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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert
+Schweitzer
+
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
+restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under
+the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
+online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+
+Title: The Quest of the Historical Jesus
+
+Author: Albert Schweitzer
+
+Release Date: April 26, 2014 [Ebook #45422]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS***
+
+
+
+
+
+                    The Quest of the Historical Jesus
+
+         A Critical Study of its Progress From Reimarus to Wrede
+
+                                    By
+
+                            Albert Schweitzer
+
+  Privatdocent in New Testament Studies in the University of Strassburg
+
+                              Translated By
+
+                        W. Montgomery, B.A., B.D.
+
+                            With a Preface by
+
+                        F. C. Burkitt, M.A., D.D.
+
+      Norrisian Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge
+
+                          Second English Edition
+
+                                  London
+
+                          Adam and Charles Black
+
+                                   1911
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Preface
+I. The Problem
+II. Hermann Samuel Reimarus
+III. The Lives Of Jesus Of The Earlier Rationalism
+IV. The Earliest Fictitious Lives Of Jesus
+V. Fully Developed Rationalism--Paulus
+VI. The Last Phase Of Rationalism--Hase And Schleiermacher
+VII. David Friedrich Strauss--The Man And His Fate
+VIII. Strauss's First "Life Of Jesus"
+IX. Strauss's Opponents And Supporters
+X. The Marcan Hypothesis
+XI. Bruno Bauer. The First Sceptical Life Of Jesus
+XII. Further Imaginative Lives Of Jesus
+XIII. Renan
+XIV. The "Liberal" Lives Of Jesus
+XV. The Eschatological Question
+XVI. The Struggle Against Eschatology
+XVII. Questions Regarding The Aramaic Language, Rabbinic Parallels, And
+Buddhistic Influence
+XVIII. The Position Of The Subject At The Close Of The Nineteenth Century
+XIX. Thoroughgoing Scepticism And Thoroughgoing Eschatology
+XX. Results
+Index Of Authors And Works
+Footnotes
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               [Cover Art]
+
+
+
+
+
+_First Edition published March 1910_
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_The book here translated is offered to the English-speaking public in the
+belief that it sets before them, as no other book has ever done, the
+history of the struggle which the best-equipped intellects of the modern
+world have gone through in endeavouring to realise for themselves the
+historical personality of our Lord._
+
+_Every one nowadays is aware that traditional Christian doctrine about
+Jesus Christ is encompassed with difficulties, and that many of the
+statements in the Gospels appear incredible in the light of modern views
+of history and nature. But when the alternative of __"__Jesus or
+Christ__"__ is put forward, as it has been in a recent publication, or
+when we are bidden to choose between the Jesus of history and the Christ
+of dogma, few except professed students know what a protean and
+kaleidoscopic figure the __"__Jesus of history__"__ is. Like the Christ in
+the Apocryphal Acts of John, He has appeared in different forms to
+different minds. __"__We know Him right well,__"__ says Professor
+Weinel._(_1_)_ What a claim!_
+
+_Among the many bold paradoxes enunciated in this history of the Quest,
+there is one that meets us at the outset, about which a few words may be
+said here, if only to encourage those to persevere to the end who might
+otherwise be repelled halfway--the paradox that the greatest attempts to
+write a Life of Jesus have been written with hate._(_2_)_ It is in full
+accordance with this faith that Dr. Schweitzer gives, in paragraph after
+paragraph, the undiluted expression of the views of men who agree only in
+their unflinching desire to attain historical truth. We are not accustomed
+to be so ruthless in England. We sometimes tend to forget that the Gospel
+has moved the world, and we think our faith and devotion to it so tender
+and delicate a thing that it will break, if it be not handled with the
+utmost circumspection. So we become dominated __ by phrases and afraid of
+them. Dr. Schweitzer is not afraid of phrases, if only they have been
+beaten out by real contact with facts. And those who read to the end will
+see that the crude sarcasm of Reimarus and the unflinching scepticism of
+Bruno Bauer are not introduced merely to shock and by way of contrast.
+Each in his own way made a real contribution to our understanding of the
+greatest historical problem in the history of our race. We see now that
+the object of attack was not the historical Jesus after all, but a
+temporary idea of Him, inadequate because it did not truly represent Him
+or the world in which He lived. And by hearing the writers' characteristic
+phrases, uncompromising as they may be, by looking at things for a moment
+from their own point of view, different as it may be from ours, we are
+able to be more just, not only to these men of a past age, but also to the
+great Problem that occupied them, as it also occupies us._
+
+_For, as Father Tyrrell has been pointing out in his last most impressive
+message to us all, Christianity is at the Cross Roads. If the Figure of
+our Lord is to mean anything for us we must realise it for ourselves. Most
+English readers of the New Testament have been too long content with the
+rough and ready Harmony of the Four Gospels that they unconsciously
+construct. This kind of __"__Harmony__"__ is not a very convincing picture
+when looked into, if only because it almost always conflicts with
+inconvenient statements of the Gospels themselves, statements that have
+been omitted from the __"__Harmony__"__, not on any reasoned theory, but
+simply from inadvertence or the difficulty of fitting them in. We treat
+the Life of our Lord too much as it is treated in the Liturgical
+__"__Gospels__"__, as a simple series of disconnected anecdotes._
+
+_Dr. Schweitzer's book does not pretend to be an impartial survey. He has
+his own solution of the problems, and it is not to be expected that
+English students will endorse the whole of his view of the Gospel History,
+any more than his German fellow-workers have done. But valuable and
+suggestive as I believe his constructive work to be in its main outlines,
+I venture to think his grasp of the nature and complexity of the great
+Quest is even more remarkable, and his exposition of it cannot fail to
+stimulate us in England. Whatever we may think of Dr. Schweitzer's
+solution or that of his opponents, we too have to reckon with the Son of
+Man who was expected to come before the apostles had gone over the cities
+of Israel, the Son of Man who would come in His Kingdom before some that
+heard our Lord speak should taste death, the Son of Man who came to give
+His life a ransom for many, whom __ they would see hereafter coming with
+the clouds of heaven. __"__Who is this Son of Man?__"__ Dr. Schweitzer's
+book is an attempt to give the full historical value and the true
+historical setting to these fundamental words of the Gospel of Jesus._
+
+_Our first duty, with the Gospel as with every other ancient document, is
+to interpret it with reference to its own time. The true view of the
+Gospel will be that which explains the course of events in the first
+century and the second century, rather than that which seems to have
+spiritual and imaginative value for the twentieth century. Yet I cannot
+refrain from pointing out here one feature of the theory of thoroughgoing
+eschatology, which may appeal to those who are accustomed to the venerable
+forms of ancient Christian aspiration and worship. It may well be that
+absolute truth cannot be embodied in human thought and that its expression
+must always be clothed in symbols. It may be that we have to translate the
+hopes and fears of our spiritual ancestors into the language of our new
+world. We have to learn, as the Church in the second century had to learn,
+that the End is not yet, that New Jerusalem, like all other objects of
+sense, is an image of the truth rather than the truth itself. But at least
+we are beginning to see that the apocalyptic vision, the New Age which God
+is to bring in, is no mere embroidery of Christianity, but the heart of
+its enthusiasm. And therefore the expectations of vindication and judgment
+to come, the imagery of the Messianic Feast, the __"__other-
+worldliness__"__ against which so many eloquent words were said in the
+nineteenth century, are not to be regarded as regrettable accretions
+foisted on by superstition to the pure morality of the original Gospel.
+These ideas are the Christian Hope, to be allegorised and
+__"__spiritualised__"__ by us for our own use whenever necessary, but not
+to be given up so long as we remain Christians at all. Books which teach
+us boldly to trust the evidence of our documents, and to accept the
+eschatology of the Christian Gospel as being historically the eschatology
+of Jesus, help us at the same time to retain a real meaning and use for
+the ancient phrases of the Te Deum, and for the mediaeval strain of
+__"__Jerusalem the Golden.__"_
+
+_F. C. Burkitt._
+
+_Cambridge, 1910._
+
+
+
+
+
+I. THE PROBLEM
+
+
+When, at some future day, our period of civilisation shall lie, closed and
+completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will
+stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life
+of our time. For nowhere save in the German temperament can there be found
+in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors--of
+philosophic thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious
+feeling--without which no deep theology is possible.
+
+And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical
+investigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid
+down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of
+the future.
+
+In the history of doctrine its work has been negative; it has, so to
+speak, cleared the site for a new edifice of religious thought. In
+describing how the ideas of Jesus were taken possession of by the Greek
+spirit, it was tracing the growth of that which must necessarily become
+strange to us, and, as a matter of fact, has become strange to us.
+
+Of its efforts to create a new dogmatic we scarcely need to have the
+history written; it is alive within us. It is no doubt interesting to
+trace how modern thoughts have found their way into the ancient dogmatic
+system, there to combine with eternal ideas to form new constructions; it
+is interesting to penetrate into the mind of the thinker in which this
+process is at work; but the real truth of that which here meets us as
+history we experience within ourselves. As in the monad of Leibnitz the
+whole universe is reflected, so we intuitively experience within us, even
+apart from any clear historical knowledge, the successive stages of the
+progress of modern dogma, from rationalism to Ritschl. This experience is
+true knowledge, all the truer because we are conscious of the whole as
+something indefinite, a slow and difficult movement towards a goal which
+is still shrouded in obscurity. We have not yet arrived at any
+reconciliation between history and modern thought--only between half-way
+history and half-way thought. What the ultimate goal towards which we are
+moving will be, what this something is which shall bring new life and new
+regulative principles to coming centuries, we do not know. We can only
+dimly divine that it will be the mighty deed of some mighty original
+genius, whose truth and rightness will be proved by the fact that we,
+working at our poor half thing, will oppose him might and main--we who
+imagine we long for nothing more eagerly than a genius powerful enough to
+open up with authority a new path for the world, seeing that we cannot
+succeed in moving it forward along the track which we have so laboriously
+prepared.
+
+For this reason the history of the critical study of the life of Jesus is
+of higher intrinsic value than the history of the study of ancient dogma
+or of the attempts to create a new one. It has to describe the most
+tremendous thing which the religious consciousness has ever dared and
+done. In the study of the history of dogma German theology settled its
+account with the past; in its attempt to create a new dogmatic, it was
+endeavouring to keep a place for the religious life in the thought of the
+present; in the study of the life of Jesus it was working for the
+future--in pure faith in the truth, not seeing whereunto it wrought.
+
+Moreover, we are here dealing with the most vital thing in the world's
+history. There came a Man to rule over the world; He ruled it for good and
+for ill, as history testifies; He destroyed the world into which He was
+born; the spiritual life of our own time seems like to perish at His
+hands, for He leads to battle against our thought a host of dead ideas, a
+ghostly army upon which death has no power, and Himself destroys again the
+truth and goodness which His Spirit creates in us, so that it cannot rule
+the world. That He continues, notwithstanding, to reign as the alone Great
+and alone True in a world of which He denied the continuance, is the prime
+example of that antithesis between spiritual and natural truth which
+underlies all life and all events, and in Him emerges into the field of
+history.
+
+It is only at first sight that the absolute indifference of early
+Christianity towards the life of the historical Jesus is disconcerting.
+When Paul, representing those who recognise the signs of the times, did
+not desire to know Christ after the flesh, that was the first expression
+of the impulse of self-preservation by which Christianity continued to be
+guided for centuries. It felt that with the introduction of the historic
+Jesus into its faith, there would arise something new, something which had
+not been foreseen in the thoughts of the Master Himself, and that thereby
+a contradiction would be brought to light, the solution of which would
+constitute one of the great problems of the world.
+
+Primitive Christianity was therefore right to live wholly in the future
+with the Christ who was to come, and to preserve of the historic Jesus
+only detached sayings, a few miracles, His death and resurrection. By
+abolishing both the world and the historical Jesus it escaped the inner
+division described above, and remained consistent in its point of view.
+We, on our part, have reason to be grateful to the early Christians that,
+in consequence of this attitude they have handed down to us, not
+biographies of Jesus but only Gospels, and that therefore we possess the
+Idea and the Person with the minimum of historical and contemporary
+limitations.
+
+But the world continued to exist, and its continuance brought this one-
+sided view to an end. The supra-mundane Christ and the historical Jesus of
+Nazareth had to be brought together into a single personality at once
+historical and raised above time. That was accomplished by Gnosticism and
+the Logos Christology. Both, from opposite standpoints, because they were
+seeking the same goal, agreed in sublimating the historical Jesus into the
+supra-mundane Idea. The result of this development, which followed on the
+discrediting of eschatology, was that the historical Jesus was again
+introduced into the field of view of Christianity, but in such a way that
+all justification for, and interest in, the investigation of His life and
+historical personality were done away with.
+
+Greek theology was as indifferent in regard to the historical Jesus who
+lives concealed in the Gospels as was the early eschatological theology.
+More than that, it was dangerous to Him; for it created a new
+supernatural-historical Gospel, and we may consider it fortunate that the
+Synoptics were already so firmly established that the Fourth Gospel could
+not oust them; instead, the Church, as though from the inner necessity of
+the antitheses which now began to be a constructive element in her
+thought, was obliged to set up two antithetic Gospels alongside of one
+another.
+
+When at Chalcedon the West overcame the East, its doctrine of the two
+natures dissolved the unity of the Person, and thereby cut off the last
+possibility of a return to the historical Jesus. The self-contradiction
+was elevated into a law. But the Manhood was so far admitted as to
+preserve, in appearance, the rights of history. Thus by a deception the
+formula kept the Life prisoner and prevented the leading spirits of the
+Reformation from grasping the idea of a return to the historical Jesus.
+
+This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in
+quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of
+His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the
+Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-
+evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in
+which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even
+when He was once more recalled to life, He was still, like Lazarus of old,
+bound hand and foot with grave-clothes--the grave-clothes of the dogma of
+the Dual Nature. Hase relates, in the preface to his first Life of Jesus
+(1829), that a worthy old gentleman, hearing of his project, advised him
+to treat in the first part of the human, in the second of the divine
+Nature. There was a fine simplicity about that. But does not the
+simplicity cover a presentiment of the revolution of thought for which the
+historical method of study was preparing the way--a presentiment which
+those who were engaged in the work did not share in the same measure? It
+was fortunate that they did not; for otherwise how could they have had the
+courage to go on?
+
+The historical investigation of the life of Jesus did not take its rise
+from a purely historical interest; it turned to the Jesus of history as an
+ally in the struggle against the tyranny of dogma. Afterwards when it was
+freed from this {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} it sought to present the historic Jesus in a form
+intelligible to its own time. For Bahrdt and Venturini He was the tool of
+a secret order. They wrote under the impression of the immense influence
+exercised by the Order of the Illuminati(3) at the end of the eighteenth
+century. For Reinhard, Hess, Paulus, and the rest of the rationalistic
+writers He is the admirable revealer of true virtue, which is coincident
+with right reason. Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own
+thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make
+Him live.
+
+But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each
+individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no
+historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a
+Life of Jesus. No vital force comes into the figure unless a man breathes
+into it all the hate or all the love of which he is capable. The stronger
+the love, or the stronger the hate, the more life-like is the figure which
+is produced. For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the
+greatest of them are written with hate: that of Reimarus, the Wolfenbuettel
+Fragmentist, and that of David Friedrich Strauss. It was not so much hate
+of the Person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so
+easy to surround Him, and with which He had in fact been surrounded. They
+were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the
+robes of splendour with which He had been apparelled, and clothe Him once
+more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee.
+
+And their hate sharpened their historical insight. They advanced the study
+of the subject more than all the others put together. But for the offence
+which they gave, the science of historical theology would not have stood
+where it does to-day. "It must needs be that offences come; but woe to
+that man by whom the offence cometh." Reimarus evaded that woe by keeping
+the offence to himself and preserving silence during his lifetime--his
+work, "The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples," was only published after his
+death, by Lessing. But in the case of Strauss, who, as a young man of
+twenty-seven, cast the offence openly in the face of the world, the woe
+fulfilled itself. His "Life of Jesus" was his ruin. But he did not cease
+to be proud of it in spite of all the misfortune that it brought him. "I
+might well bear a grudge against my book," he writes twenty-five years
+later in the preface to the "Conversations of Ulrich von Hutten,"(4) "for
+it has done me much evil ('And rightly so!' the pious will exclaim). It
+has excluded me from public teaching in which I took pleasure and for
+which I had perhaps some talent; it has torn me from natural relationships
+and driven me into unnatural ones; it has made my life a lonely one. And
+yet when I consider what it would have meant if I had refused to utter the
+word which lay upon my soul, if I had suppressed the doubts which were at
+work in my mind--then I bless the book which has doubtless done me grievous
+harm outwardly, but which preserved the inward health of my mind and
+heart, and, I doubt not, has done the same for many others also."
+
+Before him, Bahrdt had his career broken in consequence of revealing his
+beliefs concerning the Life of Jesus; and after him, Bruno Bauer.
+
+It was easy for them, resolved as they were to open the way even with
+seeming blasphemy. But the others, those who tried to bring Jesus to life
+at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical
+study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The
+world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for
+truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus
+of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record. One must read the
+successive Lives of Jesus with which Hase followed the course of the study
+from the 'twenties to the 'seventies of the nineteenth century to get an
+inkling of what it must have cost the men who lived through that decisive
+period really to maintain that "courageous freedom of investigation" which
+the great Jena professor, in the preface to his first Life of Jesus,
+claims for his researches. One sees in him the marks of the struggle with
+which he gives up, bit by bit, things which, when he wrote that preface,
+he never dreamed he would have to surrender. It was fortunate for these
+men that their sympathies sometimes obscured their critical vision, so
+that, without becoming insincere, they were able to take white clouds for
+distant mountains. That was the kindly fate of Hase and Beyschlag.
+
+The personal character of the study is not only due, however, to the fact
+that a personality can only be awakened to life by the touch of a
+personality; it lies in the essential nature of the problem itself. For
+the problem of the life of Jesus has no analogue in the field of history.
+No historical school has ever laid down canons for the investigation of
+this problem, no professional historian has ever lent his aid to theology
+in dealing with it. Every ordinary method of historical investigation
+proves inadequate to the complexity of the conditions. The standards of
+ordinary historical science are here inadequate, its methods not
+immediately applicable. The historical study of the life of Jesus has had
+to create its own methods for itself. In the constant succession of
+unsuccessful attempts, five or six problems have emerged side by side
+which together constitute the fundamental problem. There is, however, no
+direct method of solving the problem in its complexity; all that can be
+done is to experiment continuously, starting from definite assumptions;
+and in this experimentation the guiding principle must ultimately rest
+upon historical intuition.
+
+The cause of this lies in the nature of the sources of the life of Jesus,
+and in the character of our knowledge of the contemporary religious world
+of thought. It is not that the sources are in themselves bad. When we have
+once made up our minds that we have not the materials for a complete Life
+of Jesus, but only for a picture of His public ministry, it must be
+admitted that there are few characters of antiquity about whom we possess
+so much indubitably historical information, of whom we have so many
+authentic discourses. The position is much more favourable, for instance,
+than in the case of Socrates; for he is pictured to us by literary men who
+exercised their creative ability upon the portrait. Jesus stands much more
+immediately before us, because He was depicted by simple Christians
+without literary gift.
+
+But at this point there arises a twofold difficulty. There is first the
+fact that what has just been said applies only to the first three Gospels,
+while the fourth, as regards its character, historical data, and discourse
+material, forms a world of its own. It is written from the Greek
+standpoint, while the first three are written from the Jewish. And even if
+one could get over this, and regard, as has often been done, the Synoptics
+and the Fourth Gospel as standing in something of the same relation to one
+another as Xenophon does to Plato as sources for the life of Socrates, yet
+the complete irreconcilability of the historical data would compel the
+critical investigator to decide from the first in favour of one source or
+the other. Once more it is found true that "No man can serve two masters."
+This stringent dilemma was not recognised from the beginning; its
+emergence is one of the results of the whole course of experiment.
+
+The second difficulty regarding the sources is the want of any thread of
+connexion in the material which they offer us. While the Synoptics are
+only collections of anecdotes (in the best, historical sense of the word),
+the Gospel of John--as stands on record in its closing words--only professes
+to give a selection of the events and discourses.
+
+From these materials we can only get a Life of Jesus with yawning gaps.
+How are these gaps to be filled? At the worst with phrases, at the best
+with historical imagination. There is really no other means of arriving at
+the order and inner connexion of the facts of the life of Jesus than the
+making and testing of hypotheses. If the tradition preserved by the
+Synoptists really includes all that happened during the time that Jesus
+was with His disciples, the attempt to discover the connexion must succeed
+sooner or later. It becomes more and more clear that this presupposition
+is indispensable to the investigation. If it is merely a fortuitous series
+of episodes that the Evangelists have handed down to us, we may give up
+the attempt to arrive at a critical reconstruction of the life of Jesus as
+hopeless.
+
+But it is not only the events which lack historical connexion; we are
+without any indication of a thread of connexion in the actions and
+discourses of Jesus, because the sources give no hint of the character of
+His self-consciousness. They confine themselves to outward facts. We only
+begin to understand these historically when we can mentally place them in
+an intelligible connexion and conceive them as the acts of a clearly
+defined personality. All that we know of the development of Jesus and of
+His Messianic self-consciousness has been arrived at by a series of
+working hypotheses. Our conclusions can only be considered valid so long
+as they are not found incompatible with the recorded facts as a whole.
+
+It may be maintained by the aid of arguments drawn from the sources that
+the self-consciousness of Jesus underwent a development during the course
+of His public ministry; it may, with equally good grounds, be denied. For
+in both cases the arguments are based upon little details in the narrative
+in regard to which we do not know whether they are purely accidental, or
+whether they belong to the essence of the facts. In each case, moreover,
+the experimental working out of the hypothesis leads to a conclusion which
+compels the rejection of some of the actual data of the sources. Each view
+equally involves a violent treatment of the text.
+
+Furthermore, the sources exhibit, each within itself, a striking
+contradiction. They assert that Jesus felt Himself to be the Messiah; and
+yet from their presentation of His life it does not appear that He ever
+publicly claimed to be so. They attribute to Him, that is, an attitude
+which has absolutely no connexion with the consciousness which they assume
+that He possessed. But once admit that the outward acts are not the
+natural expression of the self-consciousness and all exact historical
+knowledge is at an end; we have to do with an isolated fact which is not
+referable to any law.
+
+This being so, the only way of arriving at a conclusion of any value is to
+experiment, to test, by working them out, the two hypotheses--that Jesus
+felt Himself to be the Messiah, as the sources assert, or that He did not
+feel Himself to be so, as His conduct implies; or else to try to
+conjecture what kind of Messianic consciousness His must have been, if it
+left His conduct and His discourses unaffected. For one thing is certain:
+the whole account of the last days at Jerusalem would be unintelligible,
+if we had to suppose that the mass of the people had a shadow of a
+suspicion that Jesus held Himself to be the Messiah.
+
+Again, whereas in general a personality is to some extent defined by the
+world of thought which it shares with its contemporaries, in the case of
+Jesus this source of information is as unsatisfactory as the documents.
+
+What was the nature of the contemporary Jewish world of thought? To that
+question no clear answer can be given. We do not know whether the
+expectation of the Messiah was generally current or whether it was the
+faith of a mere sect. With the Mosaic religion as such it had nothing to
+do. There was no organic connexion between the religion of legal
+observance and the future hope. Further, if the eschatological hope was
+generally current, was it the prophetic or the apocalyptic form of that
+hope? We know the Messianic expectations of the prophets; we know the
+apocalyptic picture as drawn by Daniel, and, following him, by Enoch and
+the Psalms of Solomon before the coming of Jesus, and by the Apocalypses
+of Ezra and Baruch about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. But we
+do not know which was the popular form; nor, supposing that both were
+combined into one picture, what this picture really looked like. We know
+only the form of eschatology which meets us in the Gospels and in the
+Pauline epistles; that is to say, the form which it took in the Christian
+community in consequence of the coming of Jesus. And to combine these
+three--the prophetic, the Late-Jewish apocalyptic, and the Christian--has
+not proved possible.
+
+Even supposing we could obtain more exact information regarding the
+popular Messianic expectations at the time of Jesus, we should still not
+know what form they assumed in the self-consciousness of One who knew
+Himself to be the Messiah but held that the time was not yet come for Him
+to reveal Himself as such. We only know their aspect from without, as a
+waiting for the Messiah and the Messianic Age; we have no clue to their
+aspect from within as factors in the Messianic self-consciousness. We
+possess no psychology of the Messiah. The Evangelists have nothing to tell
+us about it, because Jesus told them nothing about it; the sources for the
+contemporary spiritual life inform us only concerning the eschatological
+expectation. For the form of the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus we
+have to fall back upon conjecture.
+
+Such is the character of the problem, and, as a consequence, historical
+experiment must here take the place of historical research. That being so,
+it is easy to understand that to take a survey of the study of the life of
+Jesus is to be confronted, at first sight, with a scene of the most
+boundless confusion. A series of experiments are repeated with constantly
+varying modifications suggested by the results furnished by the subsidiary
+sciences. Most of the writers, however, have no suspicion that they are
+merely repeating an experiment which has often been made before. Some of
+them discover this in the course of their work to their own great
+astonishment--it is so, for instance, with Wrede, who recognises that he is
+working out, though doubtless with a clearer consciousness of his aim, an
+idea of Bruno Bauer's.(5) If old Reimarus were to come back again, he
+might confidently give himself out to be the latest of the moderns, for
+his work rests upon a recognition of the exclusive importance of
+eschatology, such as only recurs again in Johannes Weiss.
+
+Progress, too, is curiously fitful, with long intervals of marking time
+between the advances. From Strauss down to the 'nineties there was no real
+progress, if one takes into consideration only the complete Lives of Jesus
+which appeared. But a number of separate problems took a more clearly
+defined form, so that in the end the general problem suddenly moved
+forward, as it seemed, with a jerk.
+
+There is really no common standard by which to judge the works with which
+we have to do. It is not the most orderly narratives, those which weave in
+conscientiously every detail of the text, which have advanced the study of
+the subject, but precisely the eccentric ones, those that take the
+greatest liberties with the text. It is not by the mass of facts that a
+writer sets down alongside of one another as possible--because he writes
+easily and there is no one there to contradict him, and because facts on
+paper do not come into collision so sharply as they do in reality--it is
+not in that way that he shows his power of reconstructing history, but by
+that which he recognises as impossible. The constructions of Reimarus and
+Bruno Bauer have no solidity; they are mere products of the imagination.
+But there is much more historical power in their clear grasp of a single
+definite problem, which has blinded them to all else, than there is in the
+circumstantial works of Beyschlag and Bernard Weiss.
+
+But once one has accustomed oneself to look for certain definite landmarks
+amid this apparent welter of confusion one begins at last to discover in
+vague outline the course followed, and the progress made, by the critical
+study of the life of Jesus.
+
+It falls, immediately, into two periods, that before Strauss and that
+after Strauss. The dominant interest in the first is the question of
+miracle. What terms are possible between a historical treatment and the
+acceptance of supernatural events? With the advent of Strauss this problem
+found a solution, viz., that these events have no rightful place in the
+history, but are simply mythical elements in the sources. The way was thus
+thrown open. Meanwhile, alongside of the problem of the supernatural,
+other problems had been dimly apprehended. Reimarus had drawn attention to
+the contemporary eschatological views; Hase, in his first Life of Jesus
+(1829), had sought to trace a development in the self-consciousness of
+Jesus.
+
+But on this point a clear view was impossible, because all the students of
+the subject were still basing their operations upon the harmony of the
+Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel; which means that they had not so far felt
+the need of a historically intelligible outline of the life of Jesus.
+Here, too, Strauss was the light-bringer. But the transient illumination
+was destined to be obscured by the Marcan hypothesis,(6) which now came to
+the front. The necessity of choosing between John and the Synoptists was
+first fully established by the Tuebingen school; and the right relation of
+this question to the Marcan hypothesis was subsequently shown by
+Holtzmann.
+
+While these discussions of the preliminary literary questions were in
+progress the main historical problem of the life of Jesus was slowly
+rising into view. The question began to be mooted: what was the
+significance of eschatology for the mind of Jesus? With this problem was
+associated, in virtue of an inner connexion which was not at first
+suspected, the problem of the self-consciousness of Jesus. At the
+beginning of the 'nineties it was generally felt that, in the solution
+given to this dual problem, an in some measure assured knowledge of the
+outward and inward course of the life of Jesus had been reached. At this
+point Johannes Weiss revived the comprehensive claim of Reimarus on behalf
+of eschatology; and scarcely had criticism adjusted its attitude to this
+question when Wrede renewed the attempt of Bauer and Volkmar to eliminate
+altogether the Messianic element from the life of Jesus.
+
+We are now once more in the midst of a period of great activity in the
+study of the subject. On the one side we are offered a historical
+solution, on the other a literary. The question at issue is: Is it
+possible to explain the contradiction between the Messianic consciousness
+of Jesus and His non-Messianic discourses and actions by means of a
+conception of His Messianic consciousness which will make it appear that
+He could not have acted otherwise than as the Evangelists describe; or
+must we endeavour to explain the contradiction by taking the non-Messianic
+discourses and actions as our fixed point, denying the reality of His
+Messianic self-consciousness and regarding it as a later interpolation of
+the beliefs of the Christian community into the life of Jesus? In the
+latter case the Evangelists are supposed to have attributed these
+Messianic claims to Jesus because the early Church held Him to be the
+Messiah, but to have contradicted themselves by describing His life as it
+actually was, viz., as the life of a prophet, not of one who held Himself
+to be the Messiah. To put it briefly: Does the difficulty of explaining
+the historical personality of Jesus lie in the history itself, or only in
+the way in which it is represented in the sources?
+
+This alternative will be discussed in all the critical studies of the next
+few years. Once clearly posed it compels a decision. But no one can really
+understand the problem who has not a clear notion of the way in which it
+has shaped itself in the course of the investigation; no one can justly
+criticise, or appraise the value of, new contributions to the study of
+this subject unless he knows in what forms they have been presented
+before.
+
+The history of the study of the life of Jesus has hitherto received
+surprisingly little attention. Hase, in his Life of Jesus of 1829, briefly
+records the previous attempts to deal with the subject. Friedrich von
+Ammon, himself one of the most distinguished students in this department,
+in his "Progress of Christianity,"(7) gives some information "regarding
+the most notable biographies of Jesus of the last fifty years." In the
+year 1865 Uhlhorn treated together the Lives of Jesus of Renan, Schenkel,
+and Strauss; in 1876 Hase, in his "History of Jesus," gave the only
+complete literary history of the subject;(8) in 1892 Uhlhorn extended his
+former lecture to include the works of Keim, Delff, Beyschlag, and
+Weiss;(9) in 1898 Frantzen described, in a short essay, the progress of
+the study since Strauss;(10) in 1899 and 1900 Baldensperger gave, in the
+_Theologische Rundschau_, a survey of the most recent publications;(11)
+Weinel's book, "Jesus in the Nineteenth Century," naturally only gives an
+analysis of a few classical works; Otto Schmiedel's lecture on the "Main
+Problems of the Critical Study of the Life of Jesus" (1902) merely
+sketches the history of the subject in broad outline.(12)
+
+Apart from scattered notices in histories of theology this is practically
+all the literature of the subject. There is room for an attempt to bring
+order into the chaos of the Lives of Jesus. Hase made ingenious
+comparisons between them, but he was unable to group them according to
+inner principles, or to judge them justly. Weisse is for him a feebler
+descendant of Strauss, Bruno Bauer is the victim of a fantastic
+imagination. It would indeed have been difficult for Hase to discover in
+the works of his time any principle of division. But now, when the
+literary and eschatological methods of solution have led to complementary
+results, when the post-Straussian period of investigation seems to have
+reached a provisional close, and the goal to which it has been tending has
+become clear, the time seems ripe for the attempt to trace genetically in
+the successive works the shaping of the problem as it now confronts us,
+and to give a systematic historical account of the critical study of the
+life of Jesus. Our endeavour will be to furnish a graphic description of
+all the attempts to deal with the subject; and not to dismiss them with
+stock phrases or traditional labels, but to show clearly what they really
+did to advance the formulation of the problem, whether their
+contemporaries recognised it or not. In accordance with this principle
+many famous Lives of Jesus which have prolonged an honoured existence
+through many successive editions, will make but a poor figure, while
+others, which have received scant notice, will appear great. Behind
+Success comes Truth, and her reward is with her.
+
+
+
+
+
+II. HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS
+
+
+    "Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Juenger." Noch ein Fragment des
+    Wolfenbuettelschen Ungenannten. Herausgegeben von Gotthold Ephraim
+    Lessing. Braunschweig, 1778, 276 pp. (The Aims of Jesus and His
+    Disciples. A further Instalment of the anonymous Wolfenbuettel
+    Fragments. Published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Brunswick,
+    1778.)
+
+    _Johann Salomo Semler._ Beantwortung der Fragmente eines
+    Ungenannten insbesondere vom Zwecke Jesu und seiner Juenger. (Reply
+    to the anonymous Fragments, especially to that entitled "The Aims
+    of Jesus and His Disciples.") Halle, 1779, 432 pp.
+
+
+Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of
+the life of Jesus. Luther had not so much as felt that he cared to gain a
+clear idea of the order of the recorded events. Speaking of the chronology
+of the cleansing of the Temple, which in John falls at the beginning, in
+the Synoptists near the close, of Jesus' public life, he remarks: "The
+Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and
+the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises
+in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let
+it alone." When the Lutheran theologians began to consider the question of
+harmonising the events, things were still worse. Osiander (1498-1552), in
+his "Harmony of the Gospels," maintained the principle that if an event is
+recorded more than once in the Gospels, in different connexions, it
+happened more than once and in different connexions. The daughter of
+Jairus was therefore raised from the dead several times; on one occasion
+Jesus allowed the devils whom He cast out of a single demoniac to enter
+into a herd of swine, on another occasion, those whom He cast out of two
+demoniacs; there were two cleansings of the Temple, and so forth.(13) The
+correct view of the Synoptic Gospels as being interdependent was first
+formulated by Griesbach.
+
+The only Life of Jesus written prior to the time of Reimarus which has any
+interest for us, was composed by a Jesuit in the Persian language. The
+author was the Indian missionary Hieronymus Xavier, nephew of Francis
+Xavier, and it was designed for the use of Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, who,
+in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had become the most powerful
+potentate in Hindustan. In the seventeenth century the Persian text was
+brought to Europe by a merchant, and was translated into Latin by Louis de
+Dieu, a theologian of the Reformed Church, whose intention in publishing
+it was to discredit Catholicism.(14) It is a skilful falsification of the
+life of Jesus in which the omissions, and the additions taken from the
+Apocrypha, are inspired by the sole purpose of presenting to the open-
+minded ruler a glorious Jesus, in whom there should be nothing to offend
+him.
+
+Thus there had been nothing to prepare the world for a work of such power
+as that of Reimarus. It is true, there had appeared earlier, in 1768, a
+Life of Jesus by Johann Jakob Hess(15) (1741-1828), written from the
+standpoint of the older rationalism, but it retains so much
+supernaturalism and follows so much the lines of a paraphrase of the
+Gospels, that there was nothing to indicate to the world what a master-
+stroke the spirit of the time was preparing.
+
+Not much is known about Reimarus. For his contemporaries he had no
+existence, and it was Strauss who first made his name known in
+literature.(16) He was born in Hamburg on the 22nd of December, 1694, and
+spent his life there as a professor of Oriental Languages. He died in
+1768. Several of his writings appeared during his lifetime, all of them
+asserting the claims of rational religion as against the faith of the
+Church; one of them, for example, being an essay on "The Leading Truths of
+Natural Religion." His _magnum opus_, however, which laid the historic
+basis of his attacks, was only circulated, during his lifetime, among his
+acquaintances, as an anonymous manuscript. In 1774 Lessing began to
+publish the most important portions of it, and up to 1778 had published
+seven fragments, thereby involving himself in a quarrel with Goetze, the
+Chief Pastor of Hamburg. The manuscript of the whole, which runs to 4000
+pages, is preserved in the Hamburg municipal library.
+
+The following are the titles of Fragments which he published:
+
+The Toleration of the Deists.
+
+The Decrying of Reason in the Pulpit.
+
+The impossibility of a Revelation which all men should have good grounds
+for believing.
+
+The Passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea.
+
+Showing that the books of the Old Testament were not written to reveal a
+Religion.
+
+Concerning the story of the Resurrection.
+
+The Aims of Jesus and His disciples.
+
+The monograph on the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one
+of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written. It
+exposes all the impossibilities of the narrative in the Priestly Codex,
+and all the inconsistencies which arise from the combination of various
+sources; although Reimarus has not the slightest inkling that the
+separation of these sources would afford the real solution of the problem.
+
+To say that the fragment on "The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples" is a
+magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not
+only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a
+masterpiece of general literature. The language is as a rule crisp and
+terse, pointed and epigrammatic--the language of a man who is not "engaged
+in literary composition" but is wholly concerned with the facts. At times,
+however, it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as
+though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark
+clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn; but
+then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness
+of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion. And withal, there is
+dignity and serious purpose; Reimarus's work is no pamphlet.
+
+Lessing could not, of course, accept its standpoint. His idea of
+revelation, and his conception of the Person of Jesus, were much deeper
+than those of the Fragmentist. He was a thinker; Reimarus only a
+historian. But this was the first time that a really historical mind,
+thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of
+the tradition. It was Lessing's greatness that he grasped the significance
+of this criticism, and felt that it must lead either to the destruction or
+to the re-casting of the idea of revelation. He recognised that the
+introduction of the historical element would transform and deepen
+rationalism. Convinced that the fateful moment had arrived, he disregarded
+the scruples of Reimarus's family and the objections of Nicolai and
+Mendelssohn, and, though inwardly trembling for that which he himself held
+sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand.
+
+Semler, at the close of his refutation of the fragment, ridicules its
+editor in the following apologue. "A prisoner was once brought before the
+Lord Mayor of London on a charge of arson. He had been seen coming down
+from the upper story of the burning house. 'Yesterday,' so ran his
+defence, 'about four o'clock I went into my neighbour's store-room and saw
+there a burning candle which the servants had carelessly forgotten. In the
+course of the night it would have burned down, and set fire to the stairs.
+To make sure that the fire should break out in the day-time, I threw some
+straw upon it. The flames burst out at the sky-light, the fire-engines
+came hurrying up, and the fire, which in the night might have been
+dangerous, was promptly extinguished.' 'Why did you not yourself pick up
+the candle and put it out?' asked the Lord Mayor. 'If I had put out the
+candle the servants would not have learned to be more careful; now that
+there has been such a fuss about it, they will not be so careless in
+future.' 'Odd, very odd,' said the Lord Mayor, 'he is not a criminal, only
+a little weak in the head.' So he had him shut up in the mad-house, and
+there he lies to this day."
+
+The story is extraordinarily apposite--only that Lessing was not mad; he
+knew quite well what he was doing. His object was to show how an unseen
+enemy had pushed his parallels up to the very walls, and to summon to the
+defence "some one who should be as nearly the ideal defender of religion
+as the Fragmentist was the ideal assailant." Once, with prophetic insight
+into the future, he says: "The Christian traditions must be explained by
+the inner truth of Christianity, and no written traditions can give it
+that inner truth, if it does not itself possess it."
+
+Reimarus takes as his starting-point the question regarding the content of
+the preaching of Jesus. "We are justified," he says, "in drawing an
+absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their
+writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and
+taught." What belongs to the preaching of Jesus is clearly to be
+recognised. It is contained in two phrases of identical meaning, "Repent,
+and believe the Gospel," or, as it is put elsewhere, "Repent, for the
+Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."
+
+The Kingdom of Heaven must however be understood "according to Jewish ways
+of thought." Neither Jesus nor the Baptist ever explain this expression;
+therefore they must have been content to have it understood in its known
+and customary sense. That means that Jesus took His stand within the
+Jewish religion, and accepted its Messianic expectations without in any
+way correcting them. If He gives a new development to this religion it is
+only in so far that He proclaims as near at hand the realisation of ideals
+and hopes which were alive in thousands of hearts.
+
+There was thus no need for detailed instruction regarding the nature of
+the Kingdom of Heaven; the catechism and confession of the Church at its
+commencement consisted of a single phrase. Belief was not difficult: "they
+need only believe the Gospel, namely that Jesus was about to bring in the
+Kingdom of God."(17)
+
+As there were many among the Jews who were already waiting for the Kingdom
+of God, it was no wonder that in a few days, nay in a few hours, some
+thousands believed, although they had been told only that Jesus was the
+promised prophet.
+
+This was the sum total of what the disciples knew about the Kingdom of God
+when they were sent out by their Master to proclaim its coming. Their
+hearers would naturally think of the customary meaning of the term and the
+hopes which attached themselves to it. "The purpose of sending out such
+propagandists could only be that the Jews who groaned under the Roman yoke
+and had long cherished the hope of deliverance should be stirred up all
+over Judaea and assemble themselves in their thousands."
+
+Jesus must have known, too, that if the people believed His messengers
+they would look about for an earthly deliverer and turn to Him for this
+purpose. The Gospel, therefore, meant nothing more or less to all who
+heard it than that, under the leadership of Jesus, the Kingdom of Messiah
+was about to be brought in. For them there was no difficulty in accepting
+the belief that He was the Messiah, the Son of God, for this belief did
+not involve anything metaphysical. The nation was the Son of God; the
+kings of the covenant-people were Sons of God; the Messiah was in a pre-
+eminent sense the Son of God. Thus even in His Messianic claims Jesus
+remained "within the limits of humanity."
+
+The fact that He did not need to explain to His contemporaries what He
+meant by the Kingdom of God constitutes a difficulty for us. The parables
+do not enlighten us, for they presuppose a knowledge of the conception.
+"If we could not gather from the writings of the Jews some further
+information as to what was understood at that time by the Messiah and the
+Kingdom of God, these points of primary importance would be very obscure
+and incomprehensible."
+
+"If, therefore, we desire to gain a historical understanding of Jesus'
+teaching, we must leave behind what we learned in our catechism regarding
+the metaphysical Divine Sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic
+conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought. Only those
+who carry the teachings of the catechism back into the preaching of the
+Jewish Messiah will arrive at the idea that He was the founder of a new
+religion. To all unprejudiced persons it is manifest that Jesus had not
+the slightest intention of doing away with the Jewish religion and putting
+another in its place."
+
+From Matt. v. 18 it is evident that Jesus did not break with the Law, but
+took His stand upon it unreservedly. If there was anything at all new in
+His preaching, it was the righteousness which was requisite for the
+Kingdom of God. The righteousness of the Law will no longer suffice in the
+time of the coming Kingdom; a new and deeper morality must come into
+being. This demand is the only point in which the preaching of Jesus went
+beyond the ideas of His contemporaries. But this new morality does not do
+away with the Law, for He explains it as a fulfilment of the old
+commandments. His followers, no doubt, broke with the Law later on. They
+did so, however, not in pursuance of a command of Jesus, but under the
+pressure of circumstances, at the time when they were forced out of
+Judaism and obliged to found a new religion.
+
+Jesus shared the Jewish racial exclusiveness wholly and unreservedly.
+According to Matt. x. 5 He forbade His disciples to declare to the
+Gentiles the coming of the Kingdom of God. Evidently, therefore, His
+purpose did not embrace them. Had it been otherwise, the hesitation of
+Peter in Acts x. and xi., and the necessity of justifying the conversion
+of Cornelius, would be incomprehensible.
+
+Baptism and the Lord's Supper are no evidence that Jesus intended to found
+a new religion. In the first place the genuineness of the command to
+baptize in Matt. xxviii. 19 is questionable, not only as a saying ascribed
+to the risen Jesus, but also because it is universalistic in outlook, and
+because it implies the doctrine of the Trinity and, consequently, the
+metaphysical Divine Sonship of Jesus. In this it is inconsistent with the
+earliest traditions regarding the practice of baptism in the Christian
+community, for in the earliest times, as we learn from the Acts and from
+Paul, it was the custom to baptize, not in the name of the Trinity, but in
+the name of Jesus, the Messiah.
+
+But, furthermore, it is questionable whether Baptism really goes back to
+Jesus at all. He Himself baptized no one in His own lifetime, and never
+commanded any of His converts to be baptized. So we cannot be sure about
+the origin of Baptism, though we can be sure of its meaning. Baptism in
+the name of Jesus signified only that Jesus was the Messiah. "For the only
+change which the teaching of Jesus made in their religion was that whereas
+they had formerly believed in a Deliverer of Israel who was to come in the
+future, they now believed in a Deliverer who was already present."
+
+The "Lord's Supper," again, was no new institution, but merely an episode
+at the last Paschal Meal of the Kingdom which was passing away, and was
+intended "as an anticipatory celebration of the Passover of the New
+Kingdom." A Lord's Supper in our sense, "cut loose from the Passover,"
+would have been inconceivable to Jesus, and not less so to His disciples.
+
+It is useless to appeal to the miracles, any more than to the
+"Sacraments," as evidence for the founding of a new religion. In the first
+place, we have to remember what happens in the case of miracles handed
+down by tradition. That Jesus effected cures, which in the eyes of His
+contemporaries were miraculous, is not to be denied. Their purpose was to
+prove Him to be the Messiah. He forbade these miracles to be made known,
+even in cases where they could not possibly be kept hidden, "with the sole
+purpose of making people more eager to talk of them." Other miracles,
+however, have no basis in fact, but owe their place in the narrative to
+the feeling that the miracle-stories of the Old Testament must be repeated
+in the case of Jesus, but on a grander scale. He did no really miraculous
+works; otherwise, the demands for a sign would be incomprehensible. In
+Jerusalem when all the people were looking eagerly for an overwhelming
+manifestation of His Messiahship, what a tremendous effect a miracle would
+have produced! If only a single miracle had been publicly, convincingly,
+undeniably, performed by Jesus before all the people on one of the great
+days of the Feast, such is human nature that all the people would at once
+have flocked to His standard.
+
+For this popular uprising, however, He waited in vain. Twice He believed
+that it was near at hand. The first time was when He was sending out the
+disciples and said to them: "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of
+Israel before the Son of Man comes" (Matt. x. 23). He thought that, at the
+preaching of the disciples, the people would flock to Him from every
+quarter and immediately proclaim Him Messiah; but His expectation was
+disappointed.
+
+The second time, He thought to bring about the decisive issue in
+Jerusalem. He made His entry riding on an ass's colt, that the Messianic
+prophecy of Zechariah might be fulfilled. And the people actually did cry
+"Hosanna to the Son of David!" Relying on the support of His followers He
+might now, He thought, bid defiance to the authorities. In the temple He
+arrogates to Himself supreme power, and in glowing words calls for an open
+revolt against the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, on the ground that they
+have shut the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven and forbidden others to go
+in. There is no doubt, now, that He will carry the people with Him!
+Confident in the success of His cause, He closes the great incendiary
+harangue in Matt. xxiii. with the words "Truly from henceforth ye shall
+not see me again until ye shall say Blessed is he that cometh in the name
+of the Lord"; that is, until they should hail Him as Messiah.
+
+But the people in Jerusalem refused to rise, as the Galilaeans had refused
+at the time when the disciples were sent out to rouse them. The Council
+prepared for vigorous action. The voluntary concealment by which Jesus had
+thought to whet the eagerness of the people became involuntary. Before His
+arrest He was overwhelmed with dread, and on the cross He closed His life
+with the words "My God! my God! why hast Thou forsaken me?" "This avowal
+cannot, without violence, be interpreted otherwise than as meaning that
+God had not aided Him in His aim and purpose as He had hoped. That shows
+that it had not been His purpose to suffer and die, but to establish an
+earthly kingdom and deliver the Jews from political oppression--and in that
+God's help had failed Him."
+
+For the disciples this turn of affairs meant the destruction of all the
+dreams for the sake of which they had followed Jesus. For if they had
+given up anything on His account, it was only in order to receive it again
+an hundredfold when they should openly take their places in the eyes of
+all the world as the friends and ministers of the Messiah, as the rulers
+of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus never disabused them of this
+sensuous hope, but, on the contrary, confirmed them in it. When He put an
+end to the quarrel about pre-eminence, and when He answered the request of
+the sons of Zebedee, He did not attack the assumption that there were to
+be thrones and power, but only addressed Himself to the question how men
+were in the present to establish their claims to that position of
+authority.
+
+All this implies that the time of the fulfilment of these hopes was not
+thought of by Jesus and His disciples as at all remote. In Matt. xvi. 28,
+for example, He says: "Truly I say unto you there are some standing here
+who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his
+kingdom." There is no justification for twisting this about or explaining
+it away. It simply means that Jesus promises the fulfilment of all
+Messianic hopes before the end of the existing generation.
+
+Thus the disciples were prepared for anything rather than that which
+actually happened. Jesus had never said a word to them about His dying and
+rising again, otherwise they would not have so played the coward at His
+death, nor have been so astonished at His "resurrection." The three or
+four sayings referring to these events must therefore have been put into
+His mouth later, in order to make it appear that He had foreseen these
+events in His original plan.
+
+How, then, did they get over this apparently annihilating blow? By falling
+back upon the second form of the Jewish Messianic hope. Hitherto their
+thoughts, like those of their Master, had been dominated by the political
+ideal of the prophets--the scion of David's line who should appear as the
+political deliverer of the nation. But alongside of that there existed
+another Messianic expectation which transferred everything to the
+supernatural sphere. Appearing first in Daniel, this expectation can still
+be traced in the Apocalypses, in Justin's "Dialogue with Trypho," and in
+certain Rabbinic sayings. According to these--Reimarus makes use especially
+of the statements of Trypho--the Messiah is to appear twice; once in human
+lowliness, the second time upon the clouds of heaven. When the first
+_systema_, as Reimarus calls it, was annihilated by the death of Jesus,
+the disciples brought forward the second, and gathered followers who
+shared their expectation of a second coming of Jesus the Messiah. In order
+to get rid of the difficulty of the death of Jesus, they gave it the
+significance of a spiritual redemption--which had not previously entered
+their field of vision or that of Jesus Himself.
+
+But this spiritual interpretation of His death would not have helped them
+if they had not also invented the resurrection. Immediately after the
+death of Jesus, indeed, such an idea was far from their thoughts. They
+were in deadly fear and kept close within doors. "Soon, however, one and
+another ventures to slip out. They learn that no judicial search is being
+made for them." Then they consider what is to be done. They did not take
+kindly to the idea of returning to their old haunts; on their journeyings
+the companions of the Messiah had forgotten how to work. They had seen
+that the preaching of the Kingdom of God will keep a man. Even when they
+had been sent out without wallet or money they had not lacked. The women
+who are mentioned in Luke viii. 2, 3, had made it their business to make
+good provision for the Messiah and His future ministers.
+
+Why not, then, continue this mode of life? They would surely find a
+sufficient number of faithful souls who would join them in directing their
+hopes towards a second coming of the Messiah, and while awaiting the
+future glory, would share their possessions with them. So they stole the
+body of Jesus and hid it, and proclaimed to all the world that He would
+soon return. They prudently waited, however, for fifty days before making
+this announcement, in order that the body, if it should be found, might be
+unrecognisable.
+
+What was much in their favour was the complete disorganisation of the
+Jewish state. Had there been an efficient police administration the
+disciples would not have been able to plan this fraud and organise their
+communistic fellowship. But, as it was, the new society was not even
+subjected to any annoyance in consequence of the remarkable death of a
+married couple who were buried from the apostles' house, and the
+brotherhood was even allowed to confiscate their property to its own uses.
+
+It appears, then, that the hope of the Parousia was the fundamental thing
+in primitive Christianity, which was a product of that hope much more than
+of the teaching of Jesus. Accordingly, the main problem of primitive
+dogmatics was the delay of the Parousia. Already in Paul's time the
+problem was pressing, and he had to set to work in 2 Thessalonians to
+discover all possible and impossible reasons why the Second Coming should
+be delayed. Reimarus mercilessly exposes the position of the apostle, who
+was obliged to fob people off somehow or other. The author of 2 Peter has
+a much clearer notion of what he would be at, and undertakes to restore
+the confidence of Christendom once for all with the sophism of the
+thousand years which are in the sight of God as one day, ignoring the fact
+that in the promise the reckoning was by man's years, not by God's.
+"Nevertheless it served the turn of the Apostles so well with those simple
+early Christians, that after the first believers had been bemused with it,
+and the period originally fixed had elapsed, the Christians of later
+generations, including Fathers of the Church, could continue ever after to
+feed themselves with empty hopes." The saying of Christ about the
+generation which should not die out before His return clearly fixes this
+event at no very distant date. But since Jesus has not yet appeared upon
+the clouds of heaven "these words must be strained into meaning, not that
+generation, but the Jewish people. Thus by exegetical art they are saved
+for ever, for the Jewish race will never die out."
+
+In general, however, "the theologians of the present day skim lightly over
+the eschatological material in the Gospels because it does not chime in
+with their views, and assign to the coming of Christ upon the clouds quite
+a different purpose from that which it bears in the teaching of Christ and
+His apostles." Inasmuch as the non-fulfilment of its eschatology is not
+admitted, our Christianity rests upon a fraud. In view of this fact, what
+is the evidential value of any miracle, even if it could be held to be
+authentic? "No miracle would prove that two and two make five, or that a
+circle has four angles; and no miracles, however numerous, could remove a
+contradiction which lies on the surface of the teachings and records of
+Christianity." Nor is there any weight in the appeal to the fulfilment of
+prophecy, for the cases in which Matthew countersigns it with the words
+"that the Scripture might be fulfilled" are all artificial and unreal; and
+for many incidents the stage was set by Jesus, or His disciples, or the
+Evangelists, with the deliberate purpose of presenting to the people a
+scene from the fulfilment of prophecy.
+
+The sole argument which could save the credit of Christianity would be a
+proof that the Parousia had really taken place at the time for which it
+was announced; and obviously no such proof can be produced.
+
+Such is Reimarus' reconstruction of the history. We can well understand
+that his work must have given offence when it appeared, for it is a
+polemic, not an objective historical study. But we have no right simply to
+dismiss it in a word, as a Deistic production, as Otto Schmiedel, for
+example, does;(18) it is time that Reimarus came to his own, and that we
+should recognise a historical performance of no mean order in this piece
+of Deistic polemics. His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in
+the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for
+he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which
+Jesus moved was essentially eschatological. There is some justification
+for the animosity which flames up in his writing. This historical truth
+had taken possession of his mind with such overwhelming force that he
+could no longer understand his contemporaries, and could not away with
+their profession that their beliefs were, as they professed to be,
+directly derived from the preaching of Jesus.
+
+What added to the offence was that he saw the eschatology in a wrong
+perspective. He held that the Messianic ideal which dominated the
+preaching of Jesus was that of the political ruler, the son of David. All
+his other mistakes are the consequence of this fundamental error. It was,
+of course, a mere makeshift hypothesis to derive the beginnings of
+Christianity from an imposture. Historical science was not at that time
+sufficiently advanced to lead even the man who had divined the
+fundamentally eschatological character of the preaching of Jesus onward to
+the historical solution of the problem; it needed more than a hundred and
+twenty years to fill in the chasm which Reimarus had been forced to bridge
+with that makeshift hypothesis of his.
+
+In the light of the clear perception of the elements of the problem which
+Reimarus had attained, the whole movement of theology, down to Johannes
+Weiss, appears retrograde. In all its work the thesis is ignored or
+obscured that Jesus, as a historical personality, is to be regarded, not
+as the founder of a new religion, but as the final product of the
+eschatological and apocalyptic thought of Late Judaism. Every sentence of
+Johannes Weiss's _Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes_ (1892) is a
+vindication, a rehabilitation, of Reimarus as a historical thinker.
+
+Even so the traveller on the plain sees from afar the distant range of
+mountains. Then he loses sight of them again. His way winds slowly upwards
+through the valleys, drawing ever nearer to the peaks, until at last, at a
+turn of the path, they stand before him, not in the shapes which they had
+seemed to take from the distant plain, but in their actual forms. Reimarus
+was the first, after eighteen centuries of misconception, to have an
+inkling of what eschatology really was. Then theology lost sight of it
+again, and it was not until after the lapse of more than a hundred years
+that it came in view of eschatology once more, now in its true form, so
+far as that can be historically determined, and only after it had been led
+astray, almost to the last, in all its historical researches by the sole
+mistake of Reimarus--the assumption that the eschatology was earthly and
+political in character. Thus theology shared at least the error of the man
+whom it knew only as a Deist, not as an historian, and whose true
+greatness was not recognised even by Strauss, though he raised a literary
+monument to him.
+
+The solution offered by Reimarus may be wrong; the data of observation
+from which he starts out are, beyond question, right, because the primary
+datum of all is genuinely historical. He recognised that two systems of
+Messianic expectation were present side by side in Late Judaism. He
+endeavoured to bring them into mutual relations in order to represent the
+actual movement of the history. In so doing he made the mistake of placing
+them in consecutive order, ascribing to Jesus the political Son-of-David
+conception, and to the Apostles, after His death, the apocalyptic system
+based on Daniel, instead of superimposing one upon the other in such a way
+that the Messianic King might coincide with the Son of Man, and the
+ancient prophetic conception might be inscribed within the circumference
+of the Daniel-descended apocalyptic, and raised along with it to the
+supersensuous plane. But what matters the mistake in comparison with the
+fact that the problem was really grasped?
+
+Reimarus felt that the absence in the preaching of Jesus of any definition
+of the principal term (the Kingdom of God), in conjunction with the great
+and rapid success of His preaching constituted a problem, and he
+formulated the conception that Jesus was not a religious founder and
+teacher, but purely a preacher.
+
+He brought the Synoptic and Johannine narratives into harmony by
+practically leaving the latter out of account. The attitude of Jesus
+towards the law, and the process by which the disciples came to take up a
+freer attitude, was grasped and explained by him so accurately that modern
+historical science does not need to add a word, but would be well pleased
+if at least half the theologians of the present day had got as far.
+
+Further, he recognised that primitive Christianity was not something which
+grew, so to speak, out of the teaching of Jesus, but that it came into
+being as a new creation, in consequence of events and circumstances which
+added something to that preaching which it did not previously contain; and
+that Baptism and the Lord's Supper, in the historical sense of these
+terms, were not instituted by Jesus, but created by the early Church on
+the basis of certain historical assumptions.
+
+Again, Reimarus felt that the fact that the "event of Easter" was first
+proclaimed at Pentecost constituted a problem, and he sought a solution
+for it. He recognised, further, that the solution of the problem of the
+life of Jesus calls for a combination of the methods of historical and
+literary criticism. He felt that merely to emphasise the part played by
+eschatology would not suffice, but that it was necessary to assume a
+creative element in the tradition, to which he ascribed the miracles, the
+stories which turn on the fulfilment of Messianic prophecy, the
+universalistic traits and the predictions of the passion and the
+resurrection. Like Wrede, too, he feels that the prescription of silence
+in the case of miracles of healing and of certain communications to the
+disciples constitutes a problem which demands solution.
+
+Still more remarkable is his eye for exegetical detail. He has an
+unfailing instinct for pregnant passages like Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28, which
+are crucial for the interpretation of large masses of the history. The
+fact is there are some who are historians by the grace of God, who from
+their mother's womb have an instinctive feeling for the real. They follow
+through all the intricacy and confusion of reported fact the pathway of
+reality, like a stream which, despite the rocks that encumber its course
+and the windings of its valley, finds its way inevitably to the sea. No
+erudition can supply the place of this historical instinct, but erudition
+sometimes serves a useful purpose, inasmuch as it produces in its
+possessors the pleasing belief that they are historians, and thus secures
+their services for the cause of history. In truth they are at best merely
+doing the preliminary spade-work of history, collecting for a future
+historian the dry bones of fact, from which, with the aid of his natural
+gift, he can recall the past to life. More often, however, the way in
+which erudition seeks to serve history is by suppressing historical
+discoveries as long as possible, and leading out into the field to oppose
+the one true view an army of possibilities. By arraying these in support
+of one another it finally imagines that it has created out of
+possibilities a living reality.
+
+This obstructive erudition is the special prerogative of theology, in
+which, even at the present day, a truly marvellous scholarship often
+serves only to blind the eyes to elementary truths, and to cause the
+artificial to be preferred to the natural. And this happens not only with
+those who deliberately shut their minds against new impressions, but also
+with those whose purpose is to go forward, and to whom their
+contemporaries look up as leaders. It was a typical illustration of this
+fact when Semler rose up and slew Reimarus in the name of scientific
+theology.(19)
+
+Reimarus had discredited progressive theology. Students--so Semler tells us
+in his preface--became unsettled and sought other callings. The great Halle
+theologian--born in 1725--the pioneer of the historical view of the Canon,
+the precursor of Baur in the reconstruction of primitive Christianity, was
+urged to do away with the offence. As Origen of yore with Celsus, so
+Semler takes Reimarus sentence by sentence, in such a way that if his work
+were lost it could be recovered from the refutation. The fact was that
+Semler had nothing in the nature of a complete or well-articulated
+argument to oppose to him; therefore he inaugurated in his reply the "Yes,
+but" theology, which thereafter, for more than three generations, while it
+took, itself, the most various modifications, imagined that it had finally
+got rid of Reimarus and his discovery.
+
+Reimarus--so ran the watchword of the guerrilla warfare which Semler waged
+against him--cannot be right, for he is one-sided. Jesus and His disciples
+employed two methods of teaching: one sensuous, pictorial, drawn from the
+sphere of Jewish ideas, by which they adapted their meaning to the
+understanding of the multitude, and endeavoured to raise them to a higher
+way of thinking; and alongside of that a purely spiritual teaching which
+was independent of that kind of imagery. Both methods of teaching
+continued to be used side by side, because there were always contemporary
+representatives of the two degrees of capability and the two kinds of
+temperament. "This is historically so certain that the Fragmentist's
+attack must inevitably be defeated at this point, because he takes account
+only of the sensuous representation." But his attack was not defeated.
+What happened was that, owing to the respect in which Semler was held, and
+the absolute incapacity of contemporary theology to overtake the long
+stride forward made by Reimarus, his work was neglected, and the stimulus
+which it was capable of imparting failed to take effect. He had no
+predecessors; neither had he any disciples. His work is one of those
+supremely great works which pass and leave no trace, because they are
+before their time; to which later generations pay a just tribute of
+admiration, but owe no gratitude. Indeed it would be truer to say that
+Reimarus hung a mill-stone about the neck of the rising theological
+science of his time. He avenged himself on Semler by shaking his faith in
+historical theology and even in the freedom of science in general. By the
+end of the eighth decade of the century the Halle professor was beginning
+to retrace his steps, was becoming more and more disloyal to the cause
+which he had formerly served; and he finally went so far as to give his
+approval to Woellner's edict for the regulation of religion (1788). His
+friends attributed this change of front to senility--he died 1791.
+
+Thus the magnificent overture in which are announced all the _motifs_ of
+the future historical treatment of the life of Jesus breaks off with a
+sudden discord, remains isolated and incomplete, and leads to nothing
+further.
+
+
+
+
+
+III. THE LIVES OF JESUS OF THE EARLIER RATIONALISM
+
+
+    _Johann Jakob Hess._ Geschichte der drei letzten Lebensjahre Jesu.
+    (History of the Last Three Years of the Life of Jesus.) 3 vols.,
+    1400 pp. Leipzig-Zurich, 1768-1772; 3rd ed., 1774 ff.; 7th ed.,
+    1823 ff.
+
+    _Franz Volkmar Reinhard._ Versuch ueber den Plan, welchen der
+    Stifter der christlichen Religion zum Besten der Menschheit
+    entwarf. (Essay upon the Plan which the Founder of the Christian
+    Religion adopted for the Benefit of Mankind.) 500 pp. 1781; 4th
+    ed., 1798; 5th ed., 1830. Our account is based on the 4th ed. The
+    5th contains supplementary matter by Heubner.
+
+    _Ernst August Opitz._ Preacher at Zscheppelin. Geschichte und
+    Characterzuege Jesu. (History of Jesus, with a Delineation of His
+    Character.) Jena and Leipzig, 1812. 488 pp.
+
+    _Johann Adolph Jakobi._ Superintendent at Waltershausen. Die
+    Geschichte Jesu fuer denkende und gemuetvolle Leser, 1816. (The
+    History of Jesus for thoughtful and sympathetic readers.) A second
+    volume, containing the history of the apostolic age, followed in
+    1818.
+
+    _Johann Gottfried Herder._ Vom Erloeser der Menschen. Nach unsern
+    drei ersten Evangelien. (The Redeemer of men, as portrayed in our
+    first three Gospels.) 1796. Von Gottes Sohn, der Welt Heiland.
+    Nach Johannes Evangelium. (The Son of God, the Saviour of the
+    World, as portrayed by John's Gospel.) Accompanied by a rule for
+    the harmonisation of our Gospels on the basis of their origin and
+    order. Riga, published by Hartknoch, 1797. See Herder's complete
+    works, ed. Suphan, vol. xix.
+
+
+That thorough-going theological rationalism which accepts only so much of
+religion as can justify itself at the bar of reason, and which conceives
+and represents the origin of religion in accordance with this principle,
+was preceded by a rationalism less complete, as yet not wholly dissociated
+from a simple-minded supernaturalism. Its point of view is one at which it
+is almost impossible for the modern man to place himself. Here, in a
+single consciousness, orthodoxy and rationalism lie stratified in
+successive layers. Here, to change the metaphor, rationalism surrounds
+religion without touching it, and, like a lake surrounding some ancient
+castle, mirrors its image with curious refractions.
+
+This half-developed rationalism was conscious of an impulse--it is the
+first time in the history of theology that this impulse manifests
+itself--to write the Life of Jesus; at first without any suspicion whither
+this undertaking would lead it. No rude hands were to be laid upon the
+doctrinal conception of Jesus; at least these writers had no intention of
+laying hands upon it. Their purpose was simply to gain a clearer view of
+the course of our Lord's earthly and human life. The theologians who
+undertook this task thought of themselves as merely writing an historical
+supplement to the life of the God-Man Jesus. These "Lives" are, therefore,
+composed according to the prescription of the "good old gentleman" who in
+1829 advised the young Hase to treat first of the divine, and then of the
+human side of the life of Jesus.
+
+The battle about miracle had not yet begun. But miracle no longer plays a
+part of any importance; it is a firmly established principle that the
+teaching of Jesus, and religion in general, hold their place solely in
+virtue of their inner reasonableness, not by the support of outward
+evidence.
+
+The only thing that is really rationalistic in these older works is the
+treatment of the teaching of Jesus. Even those that retain the largest
+share of supernaturalism are as completely undogmatic as the more advanced
+in their reproduction of the discourses of the Great Teacher. All of them
+make it a principle to lose no opportunity of reducing the number of
+miracles; where they can explain a miracle by natural causes, they do not
+hesitate for a moment. But the deliberate rejection of all miracles, the
+elimination of everything supernatural which intrudes itself into the life
+of Jesus, is still to seek. That principle was first consistently carried
+through by Paulus. With these earlier writers it depends on the degree of
+enlightenment of the individual whether the irreducible minimum of the
+supernatural is larger or smaller.
+
+Moreover, the period of this older rationalism, like every period when
+human thought has been strong and vigorous, is wholly unhistorical. What
+it is looking for is not the past, but itself in the past. For it, the
+problem of the life of Jesus is solved the moment it succeeds in bringing
+Jesus near to its own time, in portraying Him as the great teacher of
+virtue, and showing that His teaching is identical with the intellectual
+truth which rationalism deifies.
+
+The temporal limits of this half-and-half rationalism are difficult to
+define. For the historical study of the life of Jesus the first landmark
+which it offers is the work of Hess, which appeared in 1768. But it held
+its ground for a long time side by side with rationalism proper, which
+failed to drive it from the field. A seventh edition of Hess's Life of
+Jesus appeared as late as 1823; while a fifth edition of Reinhard's work
+saw the light in 1830. And when Strauss struck the death-blow of out-and-
+out rationalism, the half-and-half rationalism did not perish with it, but
+allied itself with the neo-supernaturalism which Strauss's treatment of
+the life of Jesus had called into being; and it still prolongs an obscure
+existence in a certain section of conservative literature, though it has
+lost its best characteristics, its simple-mindedness and honesty.
+
+These older rationalistic Lives of Jesus are, from the aesthetic point of
+view, among the least pleasing of all theological productions. The
+sentimentality of the portraiture is boundless. Boundless, also, and still
+more objectionable, is the want of respect for the language of Jesus. He
+must speak in a rational and modern fashion, and accordingly all His
+utterances are reproduced in a style of the most polite modernity. None of
+the speeches are allowed to stand as they were spoken; they are taken to
+pieces, paraphrased, and expanded, and sometimes, with the view of making
+them really lively, they are recast in the mould of a freely invented
+dialogue. In all these Lives of Jesus, not a single one of His sayings
+retains its authentic form.
+
+And yet we must not be unjust to these writers. What they aimed at was to
+bring Jesus near to their own time, and in so doing they became the
+pioneers of the historical study of His life. The defects of their work in
+regard to aesthetic feeling and historical grasp are outweighed by the
+attractiveness of the purposeful, unprejudiced thinking which here
+awakens, stretches itself, and begins to move with freedom.
+
+Johann Jakob Hess was born in 1741 and died in 1828. After working as a
+curate for seventeen years he became one of the assistant clergy at the
+Frauminster at Zurich, and later "Antistes," president, of the cantonal
+synod. In this capacity he guided the destinies of the Church in Zurich
+safely through the troublous times of the Revolution. He was not a deep
+thinker, but was well read and not without ability. As a man, he did
+splendid work.
+
+His Life of Jesus still keeps largely to the lines of a paraphrase of the
+Gospels; indeed, he calls it a paraphrasing history. It is based upon a
+harmonizing combination of the four Gospels. The matter of the Synoptic
+narratives is, as in all the Lives of Jesus prior to Strauss--with the sole
+exception of Herder's--fitted more or less arbitrarily into the intervals
+between the Passovers in the fourth Gospel.
+
+In regard to miracles, he admits that these are a stumbling-block. But
+they are essential to the Gospel narrative and to revelation; had Jesus
+been only a moral teacher and not the Son of God they would not have been
+necessary. We must be careful, however, not to prize miracles for their
+own sake, but to look primarily to their ethical teaching. It was, he
+remarks, the mistake of the Jews to regard all the acts of Jesus solely
+from the point of view of their strange and miraculous character, and to
+forget their moral teaching; whereas we, from distaste for miracle as
+such, run the risk of excluding from the Gospel history events which are
+bound up with the Gospel revelation.
+
+Above all, we must retain the supernatural birth and the bodily
+resurrection, because on the former depends the sinlessness of Jesus, on
+the latter the certainty of the general resurrection of the dead. The
+temptation of Jesus in the wilderness was a stratagem of Satan by which he
+hoped to discover "whether Jesus of Nazareth was really so extraordinary a
+person that he would have cause to fear Him." The resurrection of Lazarus
+is authentic.
+
+But the Gospel narrative is rationalised whenever it can be done. It was
+not the demons, but the Gadarene demoniacs themselves, who rushed among
+the swine. Alarmed by their fury the whole herd plunged over the precipice
+into the lake and were drowned; while by this accommodation to the fixed
+idea of the demoniacs, Jesus effected their cure. Perhaps, too, Hess
+conjectures, the Lord desired to test the Gadarenes, and to see whether
+they would attach greater importance to the good deed done to two of their
+number than to the loss of their swine. This explanation, reinforced by
+its moral, held its ground in theology for some sixty years and passed
+over into a round dozen Lives of Jesus.
+
+This plan of "presenting each occurrence in such a way that what is
+valuable and instructive in it immediately strikes the eye" is followed
+out by Hess so faithfully that all clearness of impression is destroyed.
+The parables are barely recognisable, swathed, as they are, in the mummy-
+wrappings of his paraphrase; and in most cases their meaning is completely
+travestied by the ethical or historical allusions which he finds in them.
+The parable of the pounds is explained as referring to a man who went,
+like Archelaus, to Rome to obtain the kingship, while his subjects
+intrigued behind his back.
+
+Of the peculiar beauty of the speech of Jesus not a trace remains. The
+parable of the Sower, for instance, begins: "A countryman went to sow his
+field, which lay beside a country-road, and was here and there rather
+rocky, and in some places weedy, but in general was well cultivated, and
+had a good sort of soil." The beatitude upon the mourners appears in the
+following guise: "Happy are they who amid the adversities of the present
+make the best of things and submit themselves with patience; for such men,
+if they do not see better times here, shall certainly elsewhere receive
+comfort and consolation." The question addressed by the Pharisees to John
+the Baptist, and his answer, are given dialogue-wise, in fustian of this
+kind:--_The Pharisees_: "We are directed to enquire of you, in the name of
+our president, who you profess to be? As people are at present expecting
+the Messiah, and seem not indisposed to accept you in that capacity, we
+are the more anxious that you should declare yourself with regard to your
+vocation and person." John: "The conclusion might have been drawn from my
+discourses that I was not the Messiah. Why should people attribute such
+lofty pretensions to me?" etc. In order to give the Gospels the true
+literary flavour, a characterisation is tacked on to each of the persons
+of the narrative. In the case of the disciples, for instance, this runs:
+"They had sound common sense, but very limited insight; the capacity to
+receive teaching, but an incapacity for reflective thought; a knowledge of
+their own weakness, but a difficulty in getting rid of old prejudices;
+sensibility to right feeling, but weakness in following out a pre-
+determined moral plan."
+
+The simplest occurrences give occasion for sentimental portraiture. The
+saying "Except ye become as little children" is introduced in the
+following fashion: "Jesus called a boy who was standing near. The boy
+came. Jesus took his hand and told him to stand beside Him, nearer than
+any of His disciples, so that he had the foremost place among them. Then
+Jesus threw His arm round the boy and pressed him tenderly to His breast.
+The disciples looked on in astonishment, wondering what this meant. Then
+He explained to them," etc. In these expansions Hess does not always
+escape the ludicrous. The saying of Jesus in John x. 9, "I am the door,"
+takes on the following form: "No one, whether he be sheep or shepherd, can
+come into the fold (if, that is to say, he follows the right way) except
+in so far as he knows me and is admitted by me, and included among the
+flock."
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Reinhard's work is on a distinctly higher level. The author was born in
+1753. In 1792, after he had worked for fourteen years as Docent in
+Wittenberg, he was appointed Senior Court Chaplain at Dresden. He died in
+1812.
+
+"I am, as you know, a very prosaic person," writes Reinhard to a friend,
+and in these words he has given an admirable characterisation of himself.
+The writers who chiefly appeal to him are the ancient moralists; he
+acknowledges that he has learned more from them than from a "collegium
+homileticum." In his celebrated "System of Christian Ethics" (5 vols.,
+1788-1815) he makes copious use of them. His sermons--they fill thirty-five
+volumes, and in their day were regarded as models--show some power and
+depth of thought, but are all cast in the same mould. He seems to have
+been haunted by a fear that it might some time befall him to admit into
+his mind a thought which was mystical or visionary, not justifiable by the
+laws of logic and the canons of the critical reason. With all his
+philosophising and rationalising, however, certain pillars of the
+supernaturalistic view of history remain for him immovable.
+
+At first sight one might be inclined to suppose that he frankly shared the
+belief in miracle. He mentions the raising of the widow's son, and of
+Lazarus, and accepts as an authentic saying the command of the risen Jesus
+to baptize all nations. But if we look more closely, we find that he
+deliberately brings very few miracles into his narrative, and the
+definition by which he disintegrates the conception of miracle from within
+leaves no doubt as to his own position. What he says is this: "All that
+which we call miraculous and supernatural is to be understood as only
+relatively so, and implies nothing further than an obvious exception to
+what can be brought about by natural causes, so far as we know them and
+have experience of their capacity. A cautious thinker will not venture in
+any single instance to pronounce an event to be so extraordinary that God
+could not have brought it about by the use of secondary causes, but must
+have intervened directly."
+
+The case stands similarly with regard to the divinity of Christ. Reinhard
+assumes it, but his "Life" is not directed to prove it; it leads only to
+the conclusion that the Founder of Christianity is to be regarded as a
+wonderful "divine" teacher. In order to prove His uniqueness, Reinhard has
+to show that His plan for the welfare of mankind was something
+incomparably higher than anything which hero or sage has ever striven for.
+Reinhard makes the first attempt to give an account of the teaching of
+Jesus which should be historical in the sense that all dogmatic
+considerations should be excluded. "Above all things, let us collect and
+examine the indications which we find in the writings of His companions
+regarding the designs which He had in view."
+
+The plan of Jesus shows its greatness above all in its universality.
+Reinhard is well aware of the difficulty raised in this connexion by those
+sayings which assert the prerogative of Israel, and he discusses them at
+length. He finds the solution in the assumption that Jesus in His own
+lifetime naturally confined Himself to working among His own people, and
+was content to indicate the future universal development of His plan.
+
+With the intention "of introducing a universal change, tending to the
+benefit of the whole human race," Jesus attaches His teaching to the
+Jewish eschatology. It is only the form of His teaching, however, which is
+affected by this, since He gives an entirely different significance to the
+terms Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God, referring them to a universal
+ethical reorganisation of mankind. But His plan was entirely independent
+of politics. He never based His claims upon His Davidic descent. This was,
+indeed, the reason why He held aloof from His family. Even the entry into
+Jerusalem had no Messianic significance. His plan was so entirely non-
+political that He would, on the contrary, have welcomed the severance of
+all connexion between the state and religion, in order to avoid the risk
+of a conflict between these two powers. Reinhard explains the voluntary
+death of Jesus as due to this endeavour. "He quitted the stage of the
+world by so early and shameful a death because He wished to destroy at
+once and for ever the mistaken impression that He was aiming at the
+foundation of an earthly kingdom, and to turn the thoughts, wishes, and
+efforts of His disciples and companions into another channel."
+
+In order to make the Kingdom of God a practical reality, it was necessary
+for Him to dissociate it from all the forces of this world, and to bring
+morality and religion into the closest connexion. "The law of love was the
+indissoluble bond by which Jesus for ever united morality with religion."
+"Moral instruction was the principal content and the very essence of all
+His discourses." His efforts "were directed to the establishment of a
+purely ethical organisation."
+
+It was important, therefore, to overthrow superstition and to bring
+religion within the domain of reason. First of all the priesthood must be
+deprived for ever of its influence. Then an improvement of the social
+condition of mankind must be introduced, since the level of morality
+depends upon social conditions. Jesus was a social reformer. Through the
+attainment of "the highest perfection of which Society is capable,
+universal peace" was "gradually to be brought about."
+
+But the point of primary importance for Him was the alliance of religion
+with reason. Reason was to maintain its freedom by the aid of religion,
+and religion was not to be withdrawn from the critical judgment of reason:
+all things were to be tested, and only the best retained.
+
+"From these data it is easy to determine the characteristics of a religion
+which is to be the religion of all mankind: it must be ethical,
+intelligible, and spiritual."
+
+After the plan of Jesus has been expounded on these lines, Reinhard shows,
+in the second part of his work, that, prior to Jesus, no great man of
+antiquity had devised a plan of beneficence of a scope commensurate with
+the whole human race. In the third part the conclusion is drawn that Jesus
+is the uniquely divine Teacher.
+
+But before the author can venture to draw this conclusion, he feels it
+necessary first to show that the plan of Jesus was no chimera. If we were
+obliged to admit its impracticability Jesus would have to be ranked with
+the visionaries and enthusiasts; and these, however noble and virtuous,
+can only injure the cause of rational religion. "Visionary enthusiasm and
+enlightened reason--who that knows anything of the human mind can conceive
+these two as united in a single soul?" But Jesus was no visionary
+enthusiast. "With what calmness, self-mastery, and cool determination does
+He think out and pursue His divine purpose?" By the truths which He
+revealed and declared to be divine communications He did not desire to put
+pressure upon the human mind, but only to guide it. "It would be
+impossible to show a more conscientious respect and a more delicate
+consideration for the rights of human reason than is shown by Jesus. He
+will conquer only by convincing." "He is willing to bear with
+contradiction, and condescends to meet the most irrational objections and
+the most ill-natured misrepresentations with the most incredible
+patience."
+
+It was well for Reinhard that he had no suspicion how full of enthusiasm
+Jesus was, and how He trod reason under His feet!
+
+But what kind of relation was there between this rational religion taught
+by Jesus and the Christian theology which Reinhard accepted? How does he
+harmonise the symbolical view of Baptism and the Lord's Supper which he
+here expounds with ecclesiastical doctrine? How does he pass from the
+conception of the divine teacher to that of the Son of God?
+
+This is a question which he does not feel himself obliged to answer. For
+him the one circle of thought revolves freely within the other, but they
+never come into contact with each other.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+So far as concerns the presentation of the teaching, the Life of Jesus by
+Opitz follows the same lines as that of Reinhard. It is disfigured,
+however, by a number of lapses of taste, and by a crass supernaturalism in
+the description of the miracles and experiences of the Great Teacher.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Jakobi writes "for thoughtful and sympathetic readers." He recognises that
+much of the miraculous is a later addition to the facts, but he has a
+rooted distrust of thoroughgoing rationalism, "whose would-be helpful
+explanations are often stranger than the miracles themselves." A certain
+amount of miracle must be maintained, but not for the purpose of founding
+belief upon it: "the miracles were not intended to authenticate the
+teaching of Jesus, but to surround His life with a guard of honour."(20)
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Whether Herder, in his two Lives of Jesus, is to be classed with the older
+rationalists is a question to which the answer must be "Yes, and No," as
+in the case of every attempt to classify those men of lonely greatness who
+stand apart from their contemporaries, but who nevertheless are not in all
+points in advance of them.
+
+Properly speaking, he has really nothing to do with the rationalists,
+since he is distinguished from them by the depth of his insight and his
+power of artistic apprehension, and he is far from sharing their lack of
+taste. Further, his horizon embraces problems of which rationalism, even
+in its developed form, never came in sight. He recognises that all
+attempts to harmonise the Synoptists with John are unavailing; a
+conclusion which he had avowed earlier in his "Letters referring to the
+Study of Theology."(21) He grasps this incompatibility, it is true, rather
+by the aid of poetic, than of critical insight. "Since they cannot be
+united," he writes in his "Life of Jesus according to John," "they must be
+left standing independently, each evangelist with his own special merit.
+Man, Ox, Lion, and Eagle, they advance together, supporting the throne of
+glory, but they refuse to coalesce into a single form, to unite into a
+Diatessaron." But to him belongs the honour of being the first and the
+only scholar, prior to Strauss, to recognise that the life of Jesus can be
+construed either according to the Synoptists, or according to John, but
+that a Life of Jesus based on the four Gospels is a monstrosity. In view
+of this intuitive historical grasp, it is not surprising that the
+commentaries of the theologians were an abomination to him.
+
+The fourth Gospel is, in his view, not a primitive historical source, but
+a protest against the narrowness of the "Palestinian Gospels." It gives
+free play, as the circumstances of the time demanded, to Greek ideas.
+"There was need, in addition to those earlier, purely historical Gospels,
+of a Gospel at once theological and historical, like that of John," in
+which Jesus should be presented, not as the Jewish Messiah, "but as the
+Saviour of the World."
+
+The additions and omissions of this Gospel are alike skilfully planned. It
+retains only those miracles which are symbols of a continuous permanent
+miracle, through which the Saviour of the World works constantly,
+unintermittently, among men. The Johannine miracles are not there for
+their own sakes. The cures of demoniacs are not even represented among
+them. These had no interest for the Graeco-Roman world, and the Evangelist
+was unwilling "that this Palestinian superstition should become a
+permanent feature of Christianity, to be a reproach of scoffers or a
+belief of the foolish." His recording of the raising of Lazarus is, in
+spite of the silence of the Synoptists, easily explicable. The latter
+could not yet tell the story "without exposing a family which was still
+living near Jerusalem to the fury of that hatred which had sworn with an
+oath to put Lazarus to death." John, however, could recount it without
+scruple, "for by this time Jerusalem was probably in ruins, and the
+hospitable family of Bethany were perhaps already with their Friend in the
+other world." This most naive of explanations is reproduced in a whole
+series of Lives of Jesus.
+
+In dealing with the Synoptists, Herder grasps the problem with the same
+intuitive insight. Mark is no epitomist, but the creator of the archetype
+of the Synoptic representation. "The Gospel of Mark is not an epitome; it
+is an original Gospel. What the others have, and he has not, has been
+added by them, not omitted by him. Consequently Mark is a witness to an
+original, shorter Gospel-scheme, to which the additional matter of the
+others ought properly to be regarded as a supplement."
+
+Mark is the "unornamented central column, or plain foundation stone, on
+which the others rest." The birth-stories of Matthew and Luke are "a new
+growth to meet new needs." The different tendencies, also, point to a
+later period. Mark is still comparatively friendly towards the Jews,
+because Christianity had not yet separated itself from Judaism. Matthew is
+more hostile towards them because his Gospel was written at a time when
+Christians had given up the hope of maintaining amicable relations with
+the Jews and were groaning under the pressure of persecution. It is for
+that reason that the Jesus of the Matthaean discourses lays so much stress
+upon His second coming, and presupposes the rejection of the Jewish nation
+as something already in being, a sign of the approaching end.
+
+Pure history, however, is as little to be looked for in the first three
+Gospels as in the fourth. They are the sacred epic of Jesus the Messiah,
+and model the history of their hero upon the prophetic words of the Old
+Testament. In this view, also, Herder is a precursor of Strauss.
+
+In essence, however, Herder represents a protest of art against theology.
+The Gospels, if we are to find the life of Jesus in them, must be read,
+not with pedantic learning, but with taste. From this point of view,
+miracles cease to offend. Neither Old Testament prophecies, nor
+predictions of Jesus, nor miracles, can be adduced as evidence for the
+Gospel; the Gospel is its own evidence. The miracles stand outside the
+possibility of proof, and belong to mere "Church belief," which ought to
+lose itself more and more in the pure Gospel. Yet miracles, in a limited
+sense, are to be accepted on the ground of the historic evidence. To
+refuse to admit this is to be like the Indian king who denied the
+existence of ice because he had never seen anything like it. Jesus, in
+order to help His miracle-loving age, reconciled Himself to the necessity
+of performing miracles. But, in any case, the reality of a miracle is of
+small moment in comparison with its symbolic value.
+
+In this, therefore, Herder, though in his grasp of many problems he was
+more than a generation in advance of his time, belongs to the primitive
+rationalists. He allows the supernatural to intrude into the events of the
+life of Jesus, and does not feel that the adoption of the historical
+standpoint involves the necessity of doing away with miracle. He
+contributed much to the clearing up of ideas, but by evading the question
+of miracle he slurred over a difficulty which needed to be faced and
+solved before it should be possible to entertain the hope of forming a
+really historical conception of the life of Jesus. In reading Herder one
+is apt to fancy that it would be possible to pass straight on to Strauss.
+In reality, it was necessary that a very prosaic spirit, Paulus, should
+intervene, and should attack the question of miracle from a purely
+historical standpoint, before Strauss could give expression to the ideas
+of Herder in an effectual way, _i.e._ in such a way as to produce offence.
+The fact is that in theology the most revolutionary ideas are swallowed
+quite readily so long as they smooth their passage by a few small
+concessions. It is only when a spicule of bone stands out obstinately and
+causes choking that theology begins to take note of dangerous ideas.
+Strauss is Herder with just that little bone sticking out--the absolute
+denial of miracle on historical grounds. That is to say, Strauss is a
+Herder who has behind him the uncompromising rationalism of Paulus.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE EARLIEST FICTITIOUS LIVES OF JESUS
+
+
+    _Karl Friedrich Bahrdt._ Briefe ueber die Bibel im Volkston. Eine
+    Wochenschrift von einem Prediger auf dem Lande. (Popular Letters
+    about the Bible. A weekly paper by a country clergyman.) J. Fr.
+    Dost, Halle, 1782. 816 pp.
+
+    Ausfuehrung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu. In Briefen an Wahrheit
+    suchende Leser. (An Explanation of the Plans and Aims of Jesus. In
+    letters addressed to readers who seek the truth.) 11 vols.,
+    embracing 3000 pp. August Mylius, Berlin, 1784-1792. This work is
+    a sequel to the Popular Letters about the Bible.
+
+    Die saemtlichen Reden Jesu aus den Evangelisten ausgezogen. (The
+    Whole of the Discourses of Jesus, extracted from the Gospels.)
+    Berlin, 1786.
+
+    _Karl Heinrich Venturini._ Natuerliche Geschichte des grossen
+    Propheten von Nazareth. (A Non-supernatural History of the Great
+    Prophet of Nazareth.) Bethlehem (Copenhagen), 1st ed., 1800-1802;
+    2nd ed., 1806. 4 vols., embracing 2700 pp. The work appeared
+    anonymously. The description given below is based on the 2nd ed.,
+    which shows dependence, in some of the exegetical details, upon
+    the then recently published commentaries of Paulus.
+
+
+It is strange to notice how often in the history of our subject a few
+imperfectly equipped free-lances have attacked and attempted to carry the
+decisive positions before the ordered ranks of professional theology have
+pushed their advance to these decisive points.
+
+Thus, it was the fictitious "Lives" of Bahrdt and Venturini which, at the
+end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, first
+attempted to apply, with logical consistency, a non-supernatural
+interpretation to the miracle stories of the Gospel. Further, these
+writers were the first who, instead of contenting themselves with the
+simple reproduction of the successive sections of the Gospel narrative,
+endeavoured to grasp the inner connexion of cause and effect in the events
+and experiences of the life of Jesus. Since they found no such connexion
+indicated in the Gospels, they had to supply it for themselves. The
+particular form which their explanation takes--the hypothesis of a secret
+society of which Jesus is the tool--is, it is true, rather a sorry
+makeshift. Yet, in a sense, these Lives of Jesus, for all their colouring
+of fiction, are the first which deserve the name. The rationalists, and
+even Paulus, confine themselves to describing the teaching of Jesus;
+Bahrdt and Venturini make a bold attempt to paint the portrait of Jesus
+Himself. It is not surprising that their portraiture is at once crude and
+fantastic, like the earliest attempts of art to represent the human figure
+in living movement.
+
+Karl Friedrich Bahrdt was born in 1741 at Bischofswerda. Endowed with
+brilliant abilities, he made, owing to a bad upbringing and an
+undisciplined sensuous nature, a miserable failure. After being first
+Catechist and afterwards Professor Extraordinary of Sacred Philology at
+Leipzig, he was, in 1766, requested to resign on account of scandalous
+life. After various adventures, and after holding for a time a
+professorship at Giessen, he received under Frederick's minister Zedlitz
+authorisation to lecture at Halle. There he lectured to nearly nine
+hundred students who were attracted by his inspiring eloquence. The
+government upheld him, in spite of his serious failings, with the double
+motive of annoying the faculty and maintaining the freedom of learning.
+After the death of Frederick the Great, Bahrdt had to resign his post, and
+took to keeping an inn at a vineyard near Halle. By ridiculing Woellner's
+edict (1788), he brought on himself a year of confinement in a fortress.
+He died in disrepute, in 1792.
+
+Bahrdt had begun as an orthodox cleric. In Halle he gave up his belief in
+revelation, and endeavoured to explain religion on the ground of reason.
+To this period belong the "Popular Letters about the Bible," which were
+afterwards continued in the further series, "An Explanation of the Plans
+and Aims of Jesus."
+
+His treatment of the life of Jesus has been too severely censured. The
+work is not without passages which show a real depth of feeling,
+especially in the continually recurring explanations regarding the
+relation of belief in miracle to true faith, in which the actual
+description of the life of Jesus lies embedded. And the remarks about the
+teaching of Jesus are not always commonplace. But the paraphernalia of
+dialogues of portentous length make it, as a whole, formless and
+inartistic. The introduction of a galaxy of imaginary characters--Haram,
+Schimah, Avel, Limmah, and the like--is nothing less than bewildering.
+
+Bahrdt finds the key to the explanation of the life of Jesus in the
+appearance in the Gospel narrative of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.
+They are not disciples of Jesus, but belong to the upper classes; what
+role, then, can they have played in the life of Jesus, and how came they
+to intercede on His behalf? They were Essenes. This Order had secret
+members in all ranks of society, even in the Sanhedrin. It had set itself
+the task of detaching the nation from its sensuous Messianic hopes and
+leading it to a higher knowledge of spiritual truths. It had the most
+widespread ramifications, extending to Babylon and to Egypt. In order to
+deliver the people from the limitations of the national faith, which could
+only lead to disturbance and insurrection, they must find a Messiah who
+would destroy these false Messianic expectations. They were therefore on
+the look-out for a claimant of the Messiahship whom they could make
+subservient to their aims.
+
+Jesus came under the notice of the Order immediately after His birth. As a
+child He was watched over at every step by the Brethren. At the feasts at
+Jerusalem Alexandrian Jews, secret members of the Essene Order, put
+themselves into communication with Him, explained to Him the falsity of
+the priests, inspired Him with a horror of the bloody sacrifices of the
+Temple, and made him acquainted with Socrates and Plato. This is set forth
+in dialogues of a hundred pages long. At the story of the death of
+Socrates, the boy bursts into a tempest of sobs which His friends are
+unable to calm. He longs to emulate the martyr-death of the great
+Athenian.
+
+On the market-place at Nazareth a mysterious Persian gives Him two
+sovereign remedies--one for affections of the eye, the other for nervous
+disorders.
+
+His father does his best for Him, teaching Him, along with His cousin
+John, afterwards the Baptist, about virtue and immortality. A priest
+belonging to the Essene Order, who makes their acquaintance disguised as a
+shepherd, and takes part in their conversations, leads the lads deeper
+into the knowledge of wisdom. At twelve years old, Jesus is already so far
+advanced that He argues with the Scribes in the Temple concerning
+miracles, maintaining the thesis that they are impossible.
+
+When they feel themselves ready to appear in public the two cousins take
+counsel together how they can best help the people. They agree to open the
+eyes of the people regarding the tyranny and hypocrisy of the priests.
+Through Haram, a prominent member of the Essene Order, Luke the physician
+is introduced to Jesus and places all his science at His disposal.
+
+In order to produce any effect they were obliged to practise accommodation
+to the superstitions of the people, and introduce their wisdom to them
+under the garb of folly, in the hope that, beguiled by its attractive
+exterior, the people would admit into their minds the revelation of
+rational truth, and after a time be able to emancipate themselves from
+superstition. Jesus, therefore, sees Himself obliged to appear in the role
+of the Messiah of popular expectation, and to make up His mind to work by
+means of miracles and illusions. About this He felt the gravest scruples.
+He was obliged, however, to obey the Order; and His scruples were quieted
+by the reminder of the lofty end which was to be reached by these means.
+At last, when it is pointed out to Him that even Moses had followed the
+same plan, He submits to the necessity. The influential Order undertakes
+the duty of stage-managing the miracles, and that of maintaining His
+father. On the reception of Jesus into the number of the Brethren of the
+First Degree of the Order it is made known to Him that these Brethren are
+bound to face death in the cause of the Order; but that the Order, on its
+part, undertakes so to use the machinery and influence at its disposal
+that the last extremity shall always be avoided and the Brother
+mysteriously preserved from death.
+
+Then begins the cleverly staged drama by means of which the people are to
+be converted to rational religion. The members of the Order are divided
+into three classes: The Baptized, The Disciples, The Chosen Ones. The
+Baptized receive only the usual popular teaching; the Disciples are
+admitted to further knowledge, but are not entrusted with the highest
+mysteries; the Chosen Ones, who in the Gospels are also spoken of as
+"Angels," are admitted into all wisdom. As the Apostles were only members
+of the Second Degree, they had not the smallest suspicion of the secret
+machinery which was at work. Their part in the drama of the Life of Jesus
+was that of zealous "supers." The Gospels which they composed therefore
+report, in perfect good faith, miracles which were really clever illusions
+produced by the Essenes, and they depict the life of Jesus only as seen by
+the populace from the outside.
+
+It is therefore not always possible for us to discover how the events
+which they record as miracles actually came about. But whether they took
+place in one way or another--and as to this we can sometimes get a clue
+from a hint in the text--it is certain that in all cases the process was
+natural. With reference to the feeding of the five thousand, Bahrdt
+remarks: "It is more reasonable here to think of a thousand ways by which
+Jesus might have had sufficient supplies of bread at hand, and by the
+distribution of it have shamed the disciples' lack of courage, than to
+believe in a miracle." The explanation which he himself prefers is that
+the Order had collected a great quantity of bread in a cave and this was
+gradually handed out to Jesus, who stood at the concealed entrance and
+took some every time the apostles were occupied in distributing the former
+supply to the multitude. The walking on the sea is to be explained by
+supposing that Jesus walked towards the disciples over the surface of a
+great floating raft; while they, not being able to see the raft, must
+needs suppose a miracle. When Peter tried to walk on the water he failed
+miserably. The miracles of healing are to be attributed to the art of
+Luke. He also called the attention of Jesus to remarkable cases of
+apparent death, which He then took in hand, and restored the apparently
+dead to their sorrowing friends. In such cases, however, the Lord never
+failed expressly to inform the disciples that the persons were not really
+dead. They, however, did not permit this assurance to deprive them of
+their faith in the miracle which they felt they had themselves witnessed.
+
+In teaching, Jesus had two methods: one, exoteric, simple, for the world;
+the other, esoteric, mystic, for the initiate. "No attentive reader of the
+Bible," says Bahrdt, "can fail to notice that Jesus made use of two
+different styles of speech. Sometimes He spoke so plainly and in such
+universally intelligible language, and declared truths so simple and so
+well adapted to the general comprehension of mankind that even the
+simplest could follow Him. At other times he spoke so mystically, so
+obscurely, and in so veiled a fashion that words and thoughts alike
+baffled the understandings of ordinary people, and even by more practised
+minds were not to be grasped without close reflection, so that we are told
+in John vi. 60 that 'many of His disciples, when they heard this, said,
+This is an hard saying; who can hear it?' And Jesus Himself did not deny
+it, but only told them that the reason of their not understanding His
+sayings lay in their prejudices, which made them interpret everything
+literally and materially, and overlook the ethical meaning which underlay
+His figurative language." Most of these mystical discourses are to be
+found in John, who seems to have preserved for us the greater part of the
+secret teaching imparted to the initiate. The key to the understanding of
+this esoteric teaching is to be found, therefore, in the prologue to
+John's Gospel, and in the sayings about the new birth. "To be born again"
+is identical with the degree of perfection which was attained in the
+highest class of the Brotherhood.
+
+The members of the Order met on appointed days in caves among the hills.
+When we are told in the Gospels that Jesus went alone into a mountain to
+pray, this means that He repaired to one of these secret gatherings, but
+the disciples, of course, knew nothing about that. The Order had its
+hidden caves everywhere; in Galilee as well as in the neighbourhood of
+Jerusalem.
+
+"Only by sensuous means can sensuous ideas be overcome." The Jewish
+Messiah must die and rise again, in order that the false conceptions of
+the Messiah which were cherished by the multitude might be destroyed in
+the moment of their fulfilment--that is, might be spiritualised. Nicodemus,
+Haram, and Luke met in a cave in order to take counsel how they might
+bring about the death of Jesus in a way favourable to their plans. Luke
+guaranteed that by the aid of powerful drugs which he would give Him the
+Lord should be enabled to endure the utmost pain and suffering and yet
+resist death for a long time. Nicodemus undertook so to work matters in
+the Sanhedrin that the execution should follow immediately upon the
+sentence, and the crucified remain only a short time upon the cross. At
+this moment Jesus rushed into the cave. He had scarcely had time to
+replace the stone which concealed the entrance, so closely had He been
+pursued over the rocks by hired assassins. He Himself is firmly resolved
+to die, but care must be taken that He shall not be simply assassinated,
+or the whole plan fails. If He falls by the assassin's knife, no
+resurrection will be possible.
+
+In the end, the piece is staged to perfection. Jesus provokes the
+authorities by His triumphal Messianic entry. The unsuspected Essenes in
+the council urge on His arrest and secure His condemnation--though Pilate
+almost frustrates all their plans by acquitting Him. Jesus, by uttering a
+loud cry and immediately afterwards bowing His head, shows every
+appearance of a sudden death. The centurion has been bribed not to allow
+any of His bones to be broken. Then comes Joseph of Ramath, as Bahrdt
+prefers to call Joseph of Arimathea, and removes the body to the cave of
+the Essenes, where he immediately commences measures of resuscitation. As
+Luke had prepared the body of the Messiah by means of strengthening
+medicines to resist the fearful ill-usage which He had gone through--the
+being dragged about and beaten and finally crucified--these efforts were
+crowned with success. In the cave the most strengthening nutriment was
+supplied to Him. "Since the humours of the body were in a thoroughly
+healthy condition, His wounds healed very readily, and by the third day He
+was able to walk, in spite of the fact that the wounds made by the nails
+were still open."
+
+On the morning of the third day they forced away the stone which closed
+the mouth of the grave. As Jesus was descending the rocky slopes the watch
+awakened and took to flight in alarm. One of the Essenes appeared, in the
+garb of an angel, to the women and announced to them the resurrection of
+Jesus. Shortly afterwards the Lord appeared to Mary. At the sound of His
+voice she recognises Him. "Thereupon Jesus tells her that He is going to
+His Father (to heaven--in the mystic sense of the word--that is to say, to
+the Chosen Ones in their peaceful dwellings of truth and blessedness--to
+the circle of His faithful friends, among whom He continued to live,
+unseen by the world, but still working for the advancement of His
+purpose). He bade her tell His disciples that He was alive."
+
+From His place of concealment He appeared several times to His disciples.
+Finally He bade them meet Him at the Mount of Olives, near Bethany, and
+there took leave of them. After exhorting them, and embracing each of them
+in turn, He tore Himself away from them and walked away up the mountain.
+"There stood those poor men, amazed--beside themselves with sorrow--and
+looked after Him as long as they could. But as He mounted higher, He
+entered ever deeper into the cloud which lay upon the hill-top, until
+finally He was no longer to be seen. The cloud received Him out of their
+sight."
+
+From the mountain He returned to the chief lodge of the Brotherhood. Only
+at rare intervals did He again intervene in active life--as on the occasion
+when He appeared to Paul upon the road to Damascus. But, though unseen, He
+continued to direct the destinies of the community until His death.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Venturini's "Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth" is
+related to Bahrdt's work as the finished picture to the sketch.
+
+Karl Heinrich Venturini was born at Brunswick in 1768. On the completion
+of his theological studies he vainly endeavoured to secure a post as
+Docent in the theological faculty at Helmstadt, or as Librarian at
+Wolfenbuettel.
+
+His life was blameless and his personal piety beyond reproach, but he was
+considered to be too free in his ideas. The Duke of Brunswick was
+personally well disposed towards him, but did not venture to give him a
+post on the teaching staff in face of the opposition of the consistories.
+He was reduced to earning a bare pittance by literary work, and finally in
+1806 was thankful to accept a small living in Hordorf near Brunswick. He
+then abandoned theological writing and devoted his energies to recording
+the events of contemporary history, of which he published a yearly
+chronicle--a proceeding which under the Napoleonic _regime_ was not always
+unattended with risk, as he more than once had occasion to experience. He
+continued this undertaking till 1841. In 1849 death released him from his
+tasks.
+
+Venturini's fundamental assumption is that it was impossible, even for the
+noblest spirit of mankind, to make Himself understood by the Judaism of
+His time except by clothing His spiritual teaching in a sensuous garb
+calculated to please the oriental imagination, "and, in general, by
+bringing His higher spiritual world into such relations with the lower
+sensuous world of those whom He wished to teach as was necessary to the
+accomplishment of His aims." "God's Messenger was morally bound to perform
+miracles for the Jews. These miracles had an ethical purpose, and were
+especially designed to counteract the impression made by the supposed
+miracles of the deceivers of the people, and thus to hasten the overthrow
+of the kingdom of Satan."
+
+For modern medical science the miracles are not miraculous. He never
+healed without medicaments and always carried His "portable medicine
+chest" with Him. In the case of the Syro-phoenician woman's daughter, for
+example, we can still detect in the narrative a hint of the actual course
+of events. The mother explains the case to Jesus. After enquiring where
+her dwelling was he made a sign to John, and continued to hold her in
+conversation. The disciple went to the daughter and gave her a sedative,
+and when the mother returned she found her child cured.
+
+The raisings from the dead were cases of coma. The nature-miracles were
+due to a profound acquaintance with the powers of Nature and the order of
+her processes. They involve fore-knowledge rather than control.
+
+Many miracle stories rest on obvious misunderstandings. Nothing could be
+simpler than the explanation of the miracle at Cana. Jesus had brought
+with Him as a wedding-gift some jars of good wine and had put them aside
+in another room. When the wine was finished and His mother became anxious,
+He still allowed the guests to wait a little, as the stone vessels for
+purification had not yet been filled with water. When that had been done
+He ordered the servants to pour out some of his wine, but to tell no one
+whence it came. When John, as an old man, wrote his Gospel, he got all
+this rather mixed up--had not indeed observed it very closely at the time,
+"had perhaps been the least thing merry himself," says Venturini, and had
+believed in the miracle with the rest. Perhaps, too, he had not ventured
+to ask Jesus for an explanation, for he had only become His disciple a few
+days before.
+
+The members of the Essene Order had watched over the child Jesus even in
+Egypt. As He grew older they took charge of His education along with that
+of His cousin, John, and trained them both for their work as deliverers of
+the people. Whereas the nation as a whole looked to an insurrection as the
+means of its deliverance, they knew that freedom could only be achieved by
+means of a spiritual renewal. Once Jesus and John met a band of
+insurgents: Jesus worked on them so powerfully by His fervid speech that
+they recognised the impiousness of their purpose. One of them sprang
+towards Him and laid down his arms; it was Simon, who afterwards became
+His disciple.
+
+When Jesus was about thirty years old, and, owing to the deep experiences
+of His inner life, had really far outgrown the aims of the Essene Order,
+He entered upon His office by demanding baptism from John. Just as this
+was taking place a thunderstorm broke, and a dove, frightened by the
+lightning, fluttered round the head of Jesus. Both Jesus and John took
+this as a sign that the hour appointed by God had come.
+
+The temptations in the wilderness, and upon the pinnacle of the Temple,
+were due to the machinations of the Pharisee Zadok, who pretended to enter
+into the plans of Jesus and feigned admiration for Him in order the more
+surely to entrap Him. It was Zadok, too, who stirred up opposition to Him
+in the Sanhedrin.
+
+But Jesus did not succeed in destroying the old Messianic belief with its
+earthly aims. The hatred of the leading circles against Him grew, although
+He avoided everything "that could offend their prejudices." It was for
+this reason that He even forbade His disciples to preach the Gospel beyond
+the borders of Jewish territory. He paid the temple-tax, also, although he
+had no fixed abode. When the collector went to Peter about it, the
+following dialogue took place.
+
+_Tax-collector_ (_drawing Peter aside_). Tell me, Simon, does the Rabbi
+pay the didrachma to the Temple treasury, or should we not trouble Him
+about it?
+
+_Peter._ Why shouldn't He pay it? Why do you ask?
+
+_Tax-collector._ It's been owing from both of you since last Nisan, as our
+books show. We did not like to remind your Master, out of reverence.
+
+_Peter._ I'll tell Him at once. He will certainly pay the tax. You need
+have no fear about that.
+
+_Tax-collector._ That's good. That will put everything straight, and we
+shall have no trouble over our accounts. Good-bye!
+
+When Jesus hears of it He commands Peter to go and catch a fish, and to
+take care, in removing the hook, not to tear its mouth, that it may be fit
+for salting (!) In that case it will doubtless be worth a _stater_.
+
+The time arrived when an important move must be made. In full conclave of
+the Secret Society it was resolved that Jesus should go up to Jerusalem
+and there publicly proclaim Himself as the Messiah. Then He was to
+endeavour to disabuse the people of their earthly Messianic expectations.
+
+The triumphal entry succeeded. The whole people hailed Him with
+acclamations. But when He tried to substitute for their picture of the
+Messiah one of a different character, and spoke of times of severe trial
+which should come upon all, when He showed Himself but seldom in the
+Temple, instead of taking His place at the head of the people, they began
+to doubt Him.
+
+Jesus was suddenly arrested and put to death. Here, then, the death is
+not, as in Bahrdt, a piece of play-acting, stage-managed by the Secret
+Society. Jesus really expected to die, and only to meet His disciples
+again in the eternal life of the other world. But when He so soon gave up
+the ghost, Joseph of Arimathea was moved by some vague premonition to
+hasten at once to Pontius Pilate and make request for His body. He offers
+the Procurator money. _Pilate_ (_sternly and emphatically_): "Dost thou
+also mistake me? Am I, then, such an insatiable miser? Still, thou art a
+Jew--how could this people do me justice? Know, then, that a Roman can
+honour true nobility wherever he may find it. (_He sits down and writes
+some words on a strip of parchment._) Give this to the captain of the
+guard. Thou shall be permitted to remove the body. I ask nothing for this.
+It is granted to thee freely."
+
+"A tender embrace from his wife rewarded the noble deed of the Roman,
+while Joseph left the Praetorium, and with Nicodemus, who was impatiently
+awaiting him, hastened to Golgotha." There he received the body; he washed
+it, anointed it with spices, and laid it on a bed of moss in the rock-hewn
+grave. From the blood which was still flowing from the wound in the side,
+he ventured to draw a hopeful augury, and sent word to the Essene
+Brethren. They had a hold close by, and promised to watch over the body.
+In the first four-and-twenty hours no movement of life showed itself. Then
+came the earthquake. In the midst of the terrible commotion a Brother, in
+the white robes of the Order, was making his way to the grave by a secret
+path. When he, illumined by a flash of lightning, suddenly appeared above
+the grave, and at the same moment the earth shook violently, panic seized
+the watch, and they fled. In the morning the Brother hears a sound from
+the grave: Jesus is moving. The whole Order hastens to the spot, and Jesus
+is removed to their Lodge. Two brethren remain at the grave--these were the
+"angels" whom the women saw later. Jesus, in the dress of a gardener, is
+afterwards recognised by Mary Magdalene. Later, He comes out at intervals
+from the hiding-place, where He is kept by the Brethren, and appears to
+the disciples. After forty days He took His leave of them: His strength
+was exhausted. The farewell scene gave rise to the mistaken impression of
+His Ascension.
+
+From the historical point of view these lives are not such contemptible
+performances as might be supposed. There is much penetrating observation
+in them. Bahrdt and Venturini are right in feeling that the connexion of
+events in the life of Jesus has to be discovered; the Gospels give only a
+series of occurrences, and offer no explanation why they happened just as
+they did. And if, in making Jesus subservient to the plans of a secret
+society, they represented Him as not acting with perfect freedom, but as
+showing a certain passivity, this assumption of theirs was to be
+brilliantly vindicated, a hundred years later, by the eschatological
+school, which asserts the same remarkable passivity on the part of Jesus,
+in that He allows His actions to be determined, not indeed by a secret
+society, but by the eschatological plan of God. Bahrdt and Venturini were
+the first to see that, of all Jesus' acts, His death was most
+distinctively His own, because it was by this that He purposed to found
+the kingdom.
+
+Venturini's "Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth"
+may almost be said to be reissued annually down to the present day, for
+all the fictitious "Lives" go back directly or indirectly to the type
+which he created. It is plagiarised more freely than any other Life of
+Jesus, although practically unknown by name.
+
+
+
+
+
+V. FULLY DEVELOPED RATIONALISM--PAULUS
+
+
+    _Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus._ Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage
+    einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums. Heidelberg, C. F.
+    Winter. (The Life of Jesus as the Basis of a purely Historical
+    Account of Early Christianity.) 1828. 2 vols., 1192 pp.
+
+
+    Freut euch mit Gottesandacht, wenn es gewaehrt euch ist,
+    Dem, so kurz er war, weltumschaffenden Lebensgang
+      Nach Jahrhunderten fern zu folgen,
+      Denket, glaubet, folget des Vorbildes Spur!
+
+    (Closing words of vol. ii.)
+
+    (Rejoice with grateful devotion, if unto you 'tis permitted,
+    After the lapse of centuries, still to follow afar off
+    That Life which, short as it was, changed the course of the ages;
+    Think ye well, and believe; follow the path of our Pattern.)
+
+
+Paulus was not the mere dry-as-dust rationalist that he is usually
+represented to have been, but a man of very versatile abilities. His
+limitation was that, like Reinhard, he had an unconquerable distrust of
+anything that went outside the boundaries of logical thought. That was due
+in part to the experiences of his youth. His father, a deacon in Leonberg,
+half-mystic, half-rationalist, had secret difficulties about the doctrine
+of immortality, and made his wife promise on her death-bed that, if it
+were possible, she would appear to him after her death in bodily form.
+After she was dead he thought he saw her raise herself to a sitting
+posture, and again sink down. From that time onwards he firmly believed
+himself to be in communication with departed spirits, and he became so
+dominated by this idea that in 1771 he had to be removed from his office.
+His children suffered sorely from a _regime_ of compulsory spiritualism,
+which pressed hardest upon Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, born in 1761, who,
+for the sake of peace, was obliged to pretend to his father that he was in
+communication with his mother's spirit.
+
+He himself had inherited only the rationalistic side of his father's
+temperament. As a student at the Tuebingen Stift (theological institute) he
+formed his views on the writings of Semler and Michaelis. In 1789 he was
+called to Jena as Professor of Oriental Languages, and succeeded in 1793
+to the third ordinary professorship of theology. The naturalistic
+interpretation of miracles which he upheld in his commentary on the
+Synoptic Gospels, published in 1800-1802, aroused the indignation of the
+consistories of Meiningen and Eisenach. But their petition for his removal
+from the professorship was unsuccessful, since Herder, who was president
+of the consistorium, used his influence to protect him. In 1799 Paulus, as
+Pro-rector, used his influence on behalf of his colleague Fichte, who was
+attacked on the ground of atheism; but in vain, owing to the passionate
+conduct of the accused.
+
+With Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, Paulus and his wife, a lively lady of
+some literary talents, stood in the most friendly relations.
+
+When the Jena circle began to break up, he accepted, in 1803, an
+invitation from the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian Joseph II., to go to
+Wuerzburg as Konsistorialrat and professor. There the liberal minister,
+Montgelas, was desirous of establishing a university founded on the
+principles of illuminism--Schelling, Hufeland, and Schleiermacher were
+among those whom he contemplated appointing as Docents. Here the Catholic
+theological students were obliged to attend the lectures of the Protestant
+professor of theology, as there were no Protestants to form an audience.
+His first course was on "Encyclopaedie" (_i.e._ introduction to the
+literature of theology).
+
+The plan failed. Paulus resigned his professorship and became in 1807 a
+member of the Bavarian educational council (_Schulrat_). In this capacity
+he worked at the reorganisation of the Bavarian school system at the time
+when Hegel was similarly engaged. He gave four years to this task, which
+he felt to be laid upon him as a duty. Then, in 1811, he went to
+Heidelberg as professor of theology; and he remained there until his
+death, in 1851, at the age of ninety. One of his last sayings, a few hours
+before he died, was, "I am justified before God, through my desire to do
+right." His last words were, "There is another world."
+
+The forty years of his Heidelberg period were remarkably productive; there
+was no department of knowledge on which he did not write. He expressed his
+views about homoeopathy, about the freedom of the Press, about academic
+freedom, and about the duelling nuisance. In 1831, he wrote upon the
+Jewish Question; and there the veteran rationalist showed himself a bitter
+anti-Semite, and brought upon himself the scorn of Heine. On politics and
+constitutional questions he fought for his opinions so openly and manfully
+that he had to be warned to be more discreet. In philosophy he took an
+especially keen interest. When in Jena he had, in conjunction with
+Schiller, busied himself in the study of Kant. He did a particularly
+meritorious service in preparing an edition of Spinoza's writings, with a
+biography of that thinker, in 1803, at the time when neo-Spinozism was
+making its influence felt in German philosophy. He constituted himself the
+special guardian of philosophy, and the moment he detected the slightest
+hint of mysticism, he sounded the alarm. His pet aversion was Schelling,
+who was born fourteen years later than he, in the very same house at
+Leonberg, and whom he had met as colleague at Jena and at Wuerzburg. The
+works, avowed and anonymous, which he directed against this "charlatan,
+juggler, swindler, and obscurantist," as he designated him, fill an entire
+library.
+
+In 1841, Schelling was called to the chair of philosophy in Berlin, and in
+the winter of 1841-1842 he gave his lectures on "The Philosophy of
+Revelation" which caused the Berlin reactionaries to hail him as their
+great ally. The veteran rationalist--he was eighty years old--was
+transported with rage. He had had the lectures taken down for him, and he
+published them with critical remarks under the title "The Philosophy of
+Revelation at length Revealed, and set forth for General Examination, by
+Dr. H. E. G. Paulus" (Darmstadt, 1842). Schelling was furious, and dragged
+"the impudent scoundrel" into a court of law on the charge of illicit
+publication. In Prussia the book was suppressed. But the courts decided in
+favour of Paulus, who coolly explained that "the philosophy of Schelling
+appeared to him an insidious attack upon sound reason, the unmasking of
+which by every possible means was a work of public utility, nay, even a
+duty." He also secured the result at which he aimed; Schelling resigned
+his lectureship.
+
+In his last days the veteran rationalist was an isolated survival from an
+earlier age into a period which no longer understood him. The new men
+reproached him for standing in the old ways; he accused them of a want of
+honesty. It was just in his immobility and his one-sidedness that his
+significance lay. By his consistent carrying through of the rationalistic
+explanation he performed a service to theology more valuable than those
+who think themselves so vastly his superiors are willing to acknowledge.
+
+His Life of Jesus is awkwardly arranged. The first part gives a historical
+exposition of the Gospels, section by section. The second part is a
+synopsis interspersed with supplementary matter. There is no attempt to
+grasp the life of Jesus as a connected whole. In that respect he is far
+inferior to Venturini. Strictly regarded, his work is only a harmony of
+the gospels with explanatory comments, the ground plan of which is taken
+from the Fourth Gospel.(22)
+
+The main interest centres in the explanations of the miracles, though the
+author, it must be admitted, endeavoured to guard against this. "It is my
+chief desire," he writes in his preface, "that my views regarding the
+miracle stories should not be taken as by any means the principal thing.
+How empty would devotion or religion be if one's spiritual well-being
+depended on whether one believed in miracles or no!" "The truly miraculous
+thing about Jesus is Himself, the purity and serene holiness of His
+character, which is, notwithstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the
+imitation and emulation of mankind."
+
+The question of miracle is therefore a subsidiary question. Two points of
+primary importance are certain from the outset: (1) that unexplained
+alterations of the course of nature can neither overthrow nor attest a
+spiritual truth, (2) that everything which happens in nature emanates from
+the omnipotence of God.
+
+The Evangelists intended to relate miracles; of that there can be no
+doubt. Nor can any one deny that in their time miracles entered into the
+plan of God, in the sense that the minds of men were to be astounded and
+subdued by inexplicable facts. This effect, however, is past. In periods
+to which the miraculous makes less appeal, in view of the advance in
+intellectual culture of the nations which have been led to accept
+Christianity, the understanding must be satisfied if the success of the
+cause is to be maintained.
+
+Since that which is produced by the laws of nature is really produced by
+God, the Biblical miracles consist merely in the fact that eyewitnesses
+report events of which they did not know the secondary causes. Their
+knowledge of the laws of nature was insufficient to enable them to
+understand what actually happened. For one who has discovered the
+secondary causes, the fact remains, as such, but not the miracle.
+
+The question of miracle, therefore, does not really exist, or exists only
+for those "who are under the influence of the sceptical delusion that it
+is possible really to think any kind of natural powers as existing apart
+from God, or to think the Being of God apart from the primal
+potentialities which unfold themselves in the never-ceasing process of
+Becoming." The difficulty arises from the "original sin" of dissolving the
+inner unity of God and nature, of denying the equivalence implied by
+Spinoza in his "Deus sive Natura."
+
+For the normal intelligence the only problem is to discover the secondary
+causes of the "miracles" of Jesus. It is true there is one miracle which
+Paulus retains--the miracle of the birth, or at least the possibility of
+it; in the sense that it is through holy inspiration that Mary receives
+the hope and the power of conceiving her exalted Son, in whom the spirit
+of the Messiah takes up its dwelling. Here he indirectly denies the
+natural generation, and regards the conception as an act of the self-
+consciousness of the mother.
+
+With the miracles of healing, however, the case is very simple. Sometimes
+Jesus worked through His spiritual power upon the nervous system of the
+sufferer; sometimes He used medicines known to Him alone. The latter
+applies, for instance, to the cures of the blind. The disciples, too, as
+appears from Mark vi. 7 and 13, were not sent out without medicaments, for
+the oil with which they were to anoint the sick was, of course, of a
+medicinal character; and the casting out of evil spirits was effected
+partly by means of sedatives.
+
+Diet and after-treatment played a great part, though the Evangelists say
+little about this because directions on these points would not be given
+publicly. Thus, the saying, "This kind goeth not out save by prayer and
+fasting," is interpreted as an instruction to the father as to the way in
+which he could make the sudden cure of the epileptic into a permanent one,
+viz. by keeping him to a strict diet and strengthening his character by
+devotional exercises.
+
+The nature miracles suggest their own explanation. The walking on the
+water was an illusion of the disciples. Jesus walked along the shore, and
+in the mist was taken for a ghost by the alarmed and excited occupants of
+the boat. When Jesus called to them, Peter threw himself into the water,
+and was drawn to shore by Jesus just as he was sinking. Immediately after
+taking Jesus into the boat they doubled a headland and drew clear of the
+storm centre; they therefore supposed that He had calmed the sea by His
+command. It was the same in the case where He was asleep during the storm.
+When they waked Him He spoke to them about the wind and the weather. At
+that moment they gained the shelter of a hill which protected them from
+the wind that swept down the valley; and they marvelled among themselves
+that even the winds and the sea obeyed their Messiah.
+
+The feeding of the five thousand is explained in the following way. When
+Jesus saw the multitude all hungered, He said to His disciples, "We will
+set the rich people among them a good example, that they may share their
+supplies with the others," and he began to distribute His own provisions,
+and those of the disciples, to the people who were sitting near them. The
+example had its effect, and soon there was plenty for every one.
+
+The explanation of the transfiguration is somewhat more complicated. While
+Jesus was lingering with a few followers in this mountainous district He
+had an interview upon a high mountain at night with two dignified-looking
+men whom His three companions took for Moses and Elias. These unknown
+persons, as we learn from Luke ix. 31, informed Him of the fate which
+awaited Him at Jerusalem. In the early morning, as the sun was rising, the
+three disciples, only half awake, looked upwards from the hollow in which
+they had been sleeping and saw Jesus with the two strangers upon the
+higher part of the mountain, illuminated by the beams of the rising sun,
+and heard them speak, now of the fate which threatened Him in the capital,
+now of the duty of steadfastness and the hopes attached thereto, and
+finally heard an exhortation addressed to themselves, bidding them ever to
+hold Jesus to be the beloved Son of the Deity, whom they must obey....
+Their drowsiness, and the clouds which in an autumnal sunrise float to and
+fro over those mountains,(23) left them no clear recollection of what had
+happened. This only added to the wonder of the vague undefined impression
+of having been in contact with apparitions from a higher sphere. The three
+who had been with Him on the mount never arrived at any more definite
+knowledge of the facts, because Jesus forbade them to speak of what they
+had seen until the end should come.
+
+In dealing with the raisings from the dead the author is in his element.
+Here he is ready with the unfailing explanation taken over from Bahrdt
+that they were only cases of coma. These narratives should not be headed
+"raisings from the dead," but "deliverances from premature burial." In
+Judaea, interment took place three hours after death. How many seemingly
+dead people may have returned to consciousness in their graves, and then
+have perished miserably! Thus Jesus, owing to a presentiment suggested to
+Him by the father's story, saves the daughter of Jairus from being buried
+while in a cataleptic trance. A similar presentiment led Him to remove the
+covering of the bier which He met at the gate of Nain, and to discover
+traces of life in the widow's son. A similar instinct moved Him to ask to
+be taken to the grave of Lazarus. When the stone is rolled away He sees
+His friend standing upright and calls to him joyfully, "Come forth!"
+
+The Jewish love of miracle "caused everything to be ascribed immediately
+to the Deity, and secondary causes to be overlooked; consequently no
+thought was unfortunately given to the question of how to prevent these
+horrible cases of premature burial from taking place!" But why does it not
+appear strange to Paulus that Jesus did not enlighten His countrymen as to
+the criminal character of over-hasty burial, instead of allowing even his
+closest followers to believe in miracle? Here the hypothesis condemns
+itself, although it has a foundation of fact, in so far as cases of
+premature burial are abnormally frequent in the East.
+
+The resurrection of Jesus must be brought under the same category if we
+are to hold fast to the facts that the disciples saw Him in His natural
+body with the print of the nails in His hands, and that He took food in
+their presence. Death from crucifixion was in fact due to a condition of
+rigor, which extended gradually inwards. It was the slowest of all deaths.
+Josephus mentions in his _Contra Apionem_ that it was granted to him as a
+favour by Titus, at Tekoa, that he might have three crucified men whom he
+knew taken down from the cross. Two of them died, but one recovered.
+Jesus, however, "died" surprisingly quickly. The loud cry which he uttered
+immediately before His head sank shows that His strength was far from
+being exhausted, and that what supervened was only a death-like trance. In
+such trances the process of dying continues until corruption sets in.
+"This alone proves that the process is complete and that death has
+actually taken place."
+
+In the case of Jesus, as in that of others, the vital spark would have
+been gradually extinguished, had not Providence mysteriously effected on
+behalf of its favourite that which in the case of others was sometimes
+effected in more obvious ways by human skill and care. The lance-thrust,
+which we are to think of rather as a mere surface wound, served the
+purpose of a phlebotomy. The cool grave and the aromatic unguents
+continued the process of resuscitation, until finally the storm and the
+earthquake aroused Jesus to full consciousness. Fortunately the earthquake
+also had the effect of rolling away the stone from the mouth of the grave.
+The Lord stripped off the grave-clothes and put on a gardener's dress
+which He managed to procure. That was what made Mary, as we are told in
+John xx. 15, take Him for the gardener. Through the women, He sends a
+message to His disciples bidding them meet Him in Galilee, and Himself
+sets out to go thither. At Emmaus, as the dusk was falling, He met two of
+His followers, who at first failed to recognise Him because His
+countenance was so disfigured by His sufferings. But His manner of giving
+thanks at the breaking of bread, and the nail-prints in His uplifted
+hands, revealed to them who He was. From them He learns where His
+disciples are, returns to Jerusalem, and appears unexpectedly among them.
+This is the explanation of the apparent contradiction between the message
+pointing to Galilee and the appearances in Jerusalem. Thomas was not
+present at this first appearance, and at a later interview was suffered to
+put his hand into the marks of the wounds. It is a misunderstanding to see
+a reproach in the words which Jesus addresses to him. What, then, is the
+meaning of "Blessed are they that have not seen and have believed"? It is
+a benediction upon Thomas for what he has done in the interests of later
+generations. "Now," Jesus says, "thou, Thomas, art convinced because thou
+hast so unmistakably seen Me. It is well for those who now or in the
+future shall not see Me; for after this they can feel a firm conviction,
+because thou hast convinced thyself so completely that to thee, whose
+hands have touched Me, no possible doubt can remain of My corporeal
+reanimation." Had it not been for Thomas's peculiar mental constitution we
+should not have known whether what was seen was a phantom or a real
+appearance of the reanimated Jesus.
+
+In this way Jesus lived with them for forty days, spending part of that
+time with them in Galilee. In consequence of the ill-treatment which He
+had undergone, He was not capable of continuous exertion. He lived quietly
+and gathered strength for the brief moments in which He appeared among His
+own followers and taught them. When He felt his end drawing near He
+returned to Jerusalem. On the Mount of Olives, in the early sunlight, He
+assembled His followers for the last time. He lifted up His hands to bless
+them, and with hands still raised in benediction He moved away from them.
+A cloud interposes itself between them and Him, so that their eyes cannot
+follow Him. As he disappeared there stood before them, clothed in white,
+the two dignified figures whom the three disciples who were present at the
+transfiguration had taken for Moses and Elias, but who were really among
+the secret adherents of Jesus in Jerusalem. These men exhorted them not to
+stand waiting there but to be up and doing.
+
+Where Jesus really died they never knew, and so they came to describe His
+departure as an ascension.
+
+This Life of Jesus is not written without feeling. At times, in moments of
+exaltation, the writer even dashes into verse. If only the lack of all
+natural aesthetic feeling did not ruin everything! Paulus constantly falls
+into a style that sets the teeth on edge. The episode of the death of the
+Baptist is headed "Court-and-Priest intrigues enhance themselves to a
+judicial murder." Much is spoiled by a kind of banality. Instead of
+"disciples," he always says "pupils," instead of "faith," "sincerity of
+conviction." The appeal which the father of the lunatic boy addresses to
+Jesus, "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief," runs "I am sincerely
+convinced; help me, even if there is anything lacking in the sincerity of
+my conviction."
+
+The beautiful saying in the story of Martha and Mary, "One thing is
+needful," is interpreted as meaning that a single course will be
+sufficient for the meal.(24) The scene in the home at Bethany rejoices in
+the heading, "Geniality of Jesus among sympathetic friends in a hospitable
+family circle at Bethany. A Messiah with no stiff solemnity about Him."
+The following is the explanation which Paulus discovers for the saying
+about the tribute-money: "So long as you need the Romans to maintain some
+sort of order among you," says Jesus, "you must provide the means thereto.
+If you were fit to be independent you would not need to serve any one but
+God."
+
+Among the historical problems, Paulus is especially interested in the idea
+of the Messiahship, and in the motives of the betrayal. His sixty-five
+pages on the history of the conception of the Messiah are a real
+contribution to the subject. The Messianic idea, he explains, goes back to
+the Davidic kingdom; the prophets raised it to a higher religious plane;
+in the times of the Maccabees the ideal of the kingly Messiah perished and
+its place was taken by that of the super-earthly deliverer. The only
+mistake which Paulus makes is in supposing that the post-Maccabean period
+went back to the political ideal of the Davidic king. On the other hand,
+he rightly interprets the death of Jesus as the deed by which He thought
+to win the Messiahship proper to the Son of Man.
+
+With reference to the question of the High Priest at the trial, he remarks
+that it does not refer to the metaphysical Divine Sonship, but to the
+Messiahship in the ancient Jewish sense, and accordingly Jesus answers by
+pointing to the coming of the Son of Man.
+
+The importance of eschatology in the preaching of Jesus is clearly
+recognised, but Paulus proceeds to nullify this recognition by making the
+risen Lord cut short all the questions of the disciples in regard to this
+subject with the admonition "that in whatever way all this should come
+about, and whether soon or late, their business was to see that they had
+done their own part."
+
+How did Judas come to play the traitor? He believed in the Messiahship of
+Jesus and wanted to force Him to declare Himself. To bring about His
+arrest seemed to Judas the best means of rousing the people to take His
+side openly. But the course of events was too rapid for him. Owing to the
+Feast the news of the arrest spread but slowly. In the night "when people
+were sleeping off the effects of the Passover supper," Jesus was
+condemned; in the morning, before they were well awake, He was hurried
+away to be crucified. Then Judas was overcome with despair, and went and
+hanged himself. "Judas stands before us in the history of the Passion as a
+warning example of those who allow their cleverness to degenerate into
+cunning, and persuade themselves that it is permissible to do evil that
+good may come--to seek good objects, which they really value, by intrigue
+and chicanery. And the underlying cause of their errors is that they have
+failed to overcome their passionate desire for self-advancement."
+
+Such was the consistently rationalistic Life of Jesus, which evoked so
+much opposition at the time of its appearance, and seven years later
+received its death-blow at the hands of Strauss. The method is doomed to
+failure because the author only saves his own sincerity at the expense of
+that of his characters. He makes the disciples of Jesus see miracles where
+they could not possibly have seen them; and makes Jesus Himself allow
+miracles to be imagined where He must necessarily have protested against
+such a delusion. His exegesis, too, is sometimes violent. But in this, who
+has the right to judge him? If the theologians dragged him before the
+Lord, He would command, as of old, "Let him that is without sin among you
+cast the first stone at him," and Paulus would go forth unharmed.
+
+Moreover, a number of his explanations are right in principle. The feeding
+of the multitudes and the walking on the sea must be explained somehow or
+other as misunderstandings of something that actually happened. And how
+many of Paulus' ideas are still going about in all sorts of disguises, and
+crop up again and again in commentaries and Lives of Jesus, especially in
+those of the "anti-rationalists"! Nowadays it belongs to the complete duty
+of the well-trained theologian to renounce the rationalists and all their
+works; and yet how poor our time is in comparison with theirs--how poor in
+strong men capable of loyalty to an ideal, how poor, so far as theology is
+concerned, in simple commonplace sincerity!
+
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE LAST PHASE OF RATIONALISM--HASE AND SCHLEIERMACHER
+
+
+    _Karl August Hase._ Das Leben Jesu zunaechst fuer akademische
+    Studien. (The Life of Jesus, primarily for the use of students.)
+    1829. 205 pp. This work contains a bibliography of the earliest
+    literature of the subject. 5th ed., 1865.
+
+    _Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher._ Das Leben Jesu. 1864.
+    Edited by Ruetenik. The edition is based upon a student's note-book
+    of a course of lectures delivered in 1832.
+
+    _David Friedrich Strauss._ Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus
+    der Geschichte. Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu.
+    (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History. A criticism of
+    Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus.) 1865.
+
+
+In their treatment of the life of Jesus, Hase and Schleiermacher are in
+one respect still wholly dominated by rationalism. They still cling to the
+rationalistic explanation of miracle; although they have no longer the
+same ingenuous confidence in it as their predecessors, and although at the
+decisive cases they are content to leave a question-mark instead of
+offering a solution. They might, in fact, be described as the sceptics of
+rationalism. In another respect, however, they aim at something beyond the
+range of rationalism, inasmuch as they endeavour to grasp the inner
+connexion of the events of Jesus' ministry, which in Paulus had entirely
+fallen out of sight. Their Lives of Jesus are transitional, in the good
+sense of the word as well as in the bad. In respect of progress, Hase
+shows himself the greater of the two.
+
+Scarcely thirteen years have elapsed since the death of the great Jena
+professor, his Excellency von Hase, and already we think of him as a man
+of the past. Theology has voted to inscribe his name upon its records in
+letters of gold--and has passed on to the order of the day. He was no
+pioneer like Baur, and he does not meet the present age on the footing of
+a contemporary, offering it problems raised by him and still unsolved.
+Even his "Church History," with its twelve editions, has already had its
+day, although it is still the most brilliantly written work in this
+department, and conceals beneath its elegance of form a massive erudition.
+He was more than a theologian; he was one of the finest monuments of
+German culture, the living embodiment of a period which for us lies under
+the sunset glow of the past, in the land of "once upon a time."
+
+His path in life was unembarrassed; he knew toil, but not disappointment.
+Born in 1800, he finished his studies at Tuebingen, where he qualified as a
+Privat-Docent in 1823. In 1824-1825 he spent eleven months in the fortress
+of Hohenasperg, where he was confined for taking the part of the
+Burschenschaften,(25) and had leisure for meditation and literary plans.
+In 1830 he went to Jena, where, with a yearly visit to Italy to lay in a
+store of sunshine and renewed strength, he worked until 1890.
+
+Not without a certain reverence does one take this little text-book of 205
+pages into one's hands. This is the first attempt by a fully equipped
+scholar to reconstruct the life of Jesus on a purely historical basis.
+There is more creative power in it than in almost any of his later works.
+It manifests already the brilliant qualities of style for which he was
+distinguished--clearness, terseness, elegance. What a contrast with that of
+Bahrdt, Venturini, or Paulus!
+
+And yet the keynote of the work is rationalistic, since Hase has recourse
+to the rationalistic explanation of miracles wherever that appears
+possible. He seeks to make the circumstances of the baptism intelligible
+by supposing the appearance of a meteor. In the story of the
+transfiguration, the fact which is to be retained is that Jesus, in the
+company of two unknown persons, appeared to the disciples in unaccustomed
+splendour. Their identification of His companions as Moses and Elias is a
+conclusion which is not confirmed by Jesus, and owing to the position of
+the eyewitnesses, is not sufficiently guaranteed by their testimony. The
+abrupt breaking off of the interview by the Master, and the injunction of
+silence, point to some secret circumstance in His history. By this hint
+Hase seems to leave room for the "secret society" of Bahrdt and Venturini.
+
+He makes no difficulty about the explanation of the story of the _stater_.
+It is only intended to show "how the Messiah avoided offence in submitting
+Himself to the financial burdens of the community." In regard to the
+stilling of the storm, it seems uncertain whether Jesus through His
+knowledge of nature was enabled to predict the end of the storm or whether
+He brought it about by the possession of power over nature. The "sceptic
+of rationalism" thus leaves open the possibility of miracle. He proceeds
+somewhat similarly in explaining the raisings from the dead. They can be
+made intelligible by supposing that they were cases of coma, but it is
+also possible to look upon them as supernatural. For the two great
+Johannine miracles, the change of the water into wine and the increase of
+the loaves, no naturalistic explanation can be admitted. But how
+unsuccessful is his attempt to make the increase of the bread
+intelligible! "Why should not the bread have been increased?" he asks. "If
+nature every year in the period between seed-time and harvest performs a
+similar miracle, nature might also, by unknown laws, bring it about in a
+moment." Here crops up the dangerous anti-rationalistic intellectual
+supernaturalism which sometimes brings Hase and Schleiermacher very close
+to the frontiers of the territory occupied by the disingenuous
+reactionaries.
+
+The crucial point is the explanation of the resurrection of Jesus. A
+stringent proof that death had actually taken place cannot, according to
+Hase, be given, since there is no evidence that corruption had set in, and
+that is the only infallible sign of death. It is possible, therefore, that
+the resurrection was only a return to consciousness after a trance. But
+the direct impression made by the sources points rather to a supernatural
+event. Either view is compatible with the Christian faith. "Both the
+historically possible views--either that the Creator gave new life to a
+body which was really dead, or that the latent life reawakened in a body
+which was only seemingly dead--recognise in the resurrection a manifest
+proof of the care of Providence for the cause of Jesus, and are therefore
+both to be recognised as Christian, whereas a third view--that Jesus gave
+Himself up to his enemies in order to defeat them by the bold stroke of a
+seeming death and a skilfully prepared resurrection--is as contrary to
+historical criticism as to Christian faith."
+
+Hase, however, quietly lightens the difficulty of the miracle question in
+a way which must not be overlooked. For the rationalists all miracles
+stood on the same footing, and all must equally be abolished by a
+naturalistic explanation. If we study Hase carefully, we find that he
+accepts only the Johannine miracles as authentic, whereas those of the
+Synoptists may be regarded as resting upon a misunderstanding on the part
+of the authors, because they are not reported at first hand, but from
+tradition. Thus the discrimination of the two lines of Gospel tradition
+comes to the aid of the anti-rationalists, and enables them to get rid of
+some of the greatest difficulties. Half playfully, it might almost be
+said, they sketch out the ideas of Strauss, without ever suspecting what
+desperate earnest the game will become, if the authenticity of the Fourth
+Gospel has to be given up.
+
+Hase surrenders the birth-story and the "legends of the Childhood"--the
+expression is his own--almost without striking a blow. The same fate
+befalls all the incidents in which angels figure, and the miracles at the
+time of the death of Jesus. He describes these as "mythical touches." The
+ascension is merely "a mythical version of His departure to the Father."
+
+Hase's conception even of the non-miraculous portion of the history of
+Jesus is not free from rationalistic traits. He indulges in the following
+speculations with regard to the celibacy of the Lord. "If the true grounds
+of the celibacy of Jesus do not lie hidden in the special circumstances of
+His youth, the conjecture may be permitted that He from whose religion was
+to go forth the ideal view of marriage, so foreign to the ideas of
+antiquity, found in His own time no heart worthy to enter into this
+covenant with Him." It is on rationalistic lines also that Hase explains
+the betrayal by Judas. "A purely intellectual, worldly, and unscrupulous
+character, he desired to compel the hesitating Messiah to found His
+Kingdom upon popular violence.... It is possible that Judas in his
+terrible blindness took that last word addressed to him by Jesus, 'What
+thou doest, do quickly,' as giving consent to his plan."
+
+But Hase again rises superior to this rationalistic conception of the
+history when he refuses to explain away the Jewish elements in the plan
+and preaching of Jesus as due to mere accommodation, and maintains the
+view that the Lord really, to a certain extent, shared this Jewish system
+of ideas. According to Hase there are two periods in the Messianic
+activity of Jesus. In the first He accepted almost without reservation the
+popular ideas regarding the Messianic age. In consequence, however, of His
+experience of the practical results of these ideas, He was led to abandon
+this error, and in the second period He developed His own distinctive
+views. Here we meet for the first time the idea of two different periods
+in the life of Jesus, which, especially through the influence of Holtzmann
+and Keim, became the prevailing view, and down to Johannes Weiss,
+determined the plan of all Lives of Jesus. Hase created the modern
+historico-psychological picture of Jesus. The introduction of this more
+penetrating psychology would alone suffice to place him in advance of the
+rationalists.
+
+Another interesting point is the thorough way in which he traces out the
+historical and literary consequences of this idea of development. The
+apostles, he thinks, did not understand this progress of thought on the
+part of Jesus, and did not distinguish between the sayings of the first
+and second periods. They remained wedded to the eschatological view. After
+the death of Jesus this view prevailed so strongly in the primitive
+community of disciples that they interpolated their expectations into the
+last discourses of Jesus. According to Hase, the apocalyptic discourse in
+Matt. xxiv. was originally only a prediction of the judgment upon and
+destruction of Jerusalem, but this was obscured later by the influx of the
+eschatological views of the apostolic community. Only John remained free
+from this error. Therefore the non-eschatological Fourth Gospel preserves
+in their pure form the ideas of Jesus in His second period.
+
+Hase rightly observes that the Messiahship of Jesus plays next to no part
+in His preaching, at any rate at first, and that, before the incident at
+Caesarea Philippi, it was only in moments of enthusiastic admiration,
+rather than with settled conviction, that even the disciples looked on Him
+as the Messiah. This indication of the central importance of the
+declaration of the Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi is another sign-post
+pointing out the direction which the future study of the life of Jesus was
+to follow.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus introduces us to quite a different order of
+transitional ideas. Its value lies in the sphere of dogmatics, not of
+history. Nowhere, indeed, is it so clear that the great dialectician had
+not really a historical mind than precisely in his treatment of the
+history of Jesus.
+
+From the first it was no favourable star which presided over this
+undertaking. It is true that in 1819 Schleiermacher was the first
+theologian who had ever lectured upon this subject. But his Life of Jesus
+did not appear until 1864. Its publication had been so long delayed,
+partly because it had to be reconstructed from students' note-books,
+partly because immediately after Schleiermacher, in 1832, had delivered
+the course for the last time, it was rendered obsolete by the work of
+Strauss. For the questions raised by the latter's Life of Jesus, published
+in 1835, Schleiermacher had no answer, and for the wounds which it made,
+no healing. When, in 1864, Schleiermacher's work was brought forth to view
+like an embalmed corse, Strauss accorded to the dead work of the great
+theologian a dignified and striking funeral oration.
+
+Schleiermacher is not in search of the historical Jesus, but of the Jesus
+Christ of his own system of theology; that is to say, of the historic
+figure which seems to him appropriate to the self-consciousness of the
+Redeemer as he represents it. For him the empirical has simply no
+existence. A natural psychology is scarcely attempted. He comes to the
+facts with a ready-made dialectic apparatus and sets his puppets in lively
+action. Schleiermacher's dialectic is not a dialectic which generates
+reality, like that of Hegel, of which Strauss availed himself, but merely
+a dialectic of exposition. In this literary dialectic he is the greatest
+master that ever lived.
+
+The limitations of the historical Jesus both in an upward and downward
+direction are those only which apply equally to the Jesus of dogma. The
+uniqueness of His Divine self-consciousness is not to be tampered with. It
+is equally necessary to avoid Ebionism which does away with the Divine in
+Him, and Docetism which destroys His humanity. Schleiermacher loves to
+make his hearers shudder by pointing out to them that the least false step
+entails precipitation into one or other of these abysses; or at least
+would entail it for any one who was not under the guidance of his
+infallible dialectic.
+
+In the course of this dialectic treatment, all the historical questions
+involved in the life of Jesus come into view one after another, but none
+of them is posed or solved from the point of view of the historian; they
+are "moments" in his argument.
+
+He is like a spider at work. The spider lets itself down from aloft, and
+after making fast some supporting threads to points below, it runs back to
+the centre and there keeps spinning away. You look on fascinated, and
+before you know it, you are entangled in the web. It is difficult even for
+a reader who is strong in the consciousness of possessing a sounder grasp
+of the history than Schleiermacher to avoid being caught in the toils of
+that magical dialectic.
+
+And how loftily superior the dialectician is! Paulus had shown that, in
+view of the use of the title Son of Man, the Messianic self-consciousness
+of Jesus must be interpreted in accordance with the passage in Daniel. On
+this Schleiermacher remarks: "I have already said that it is inherently
+improbable that such a predilection (_sc._ for the Book of Daniel) would
+have been manifested by Christ, because the Book of Daniel does not belong
+to the prophetic writings properly so-called, but to the third division of
+the Old Testament literature."
+
+In his estimate of the importance to be attached to the story of the
+baptism, too, he falls behind the historical knowledge of his day. "To lay
+such great stress upon the baptism," he says, "leads either to the Gnostic
+view that it was only there that the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} united itself with Jesus, or to
+the rationalistic view that it was only at the baptism that He became
+conscious of His vocation." But what does history care whether a view is
+gnostic or rationalistic if only it is historical!
+
+This dialectic, so fatal often to sound historical views, might have been
+expressly created to deal with the question of miracle. Compared with
+Schleiermacher's discussions all that has been written since upon this
+subject is mere honest--or dishonest--bungling. Nothing new has been added
+to what he says, and no one else has succeeded in saying it with the same
+amazing subtlety. It is true, also, that no one else has shown the same
+skill in concealing how much in the way of miracle he ultimately retains
+and how much he rejects. His solution of the problem is, in fact, not
+historical, but dialectical, an attempt to transcend the necessity for a
+rationalistic explanation of miracle which does not really succeed in
+getting rid of it.
+
+Schleiermacher arranges the miracles in an ascending scale of probability
+according to the degree in which they can be seen to depend on the known
+influence of spirit upon organic matter. The most easily explained are the
+miracles of healing "because we are not without analogies to show that
+pathological conditions of a purely functional nature can be removed by
+mental influence." But where, on the other hand, the effect produced by
+Christ lies outside the sphere of human life, the difficulties involved
+become insoluble. To get rid, in some measure, of these difficulties he
+makes use of two expedients. In the first place, he admits that in
+particular cases the rationalistic method may have a certain limited
+application; in the second place he, like Hase, recognises a difference
+between the miracle stories themselves, retaining the Johannine miracles,
+but surrendering, more or less completely, the Synoptic miracles as not
+resting on evidence of the same certainty and exactness.
+
+That he is still largely under the sway of rationalism can be seen in the
+fact that he admits on an equal footing, as conceptions of the
+resurrection of Jesus, a return to consciousness from a trance-state, or a
+supernatural restoration to life, thought of as a resurrection. He goes so
+far as to say that the decision of this question has very little interest
+for him. He fully accepts the principle of Paulus that apart from
+corruption there is no certain indication of death.
+
+"All that we can say on this point," he concludes, "is that even to those
+whose business it was to ensure the immediate death of the crucified, in
+order that the bodies might at once be taken down, Christ appeared to be
+really dead, and this, moreover, although it was contrary to their
+expectations, for it was a subject of astonishment. It is no use going any
+further into the matter, since nothing can be ascertained in regard to
+it."
+
+What is certain is that Jesus in His real body lived on for a time among
+His followers; that the Fourth Gospel requires us to believe. The reports
+of the resurrection are not based upon "apparitions." Schleiermacher's own
+opinion is what really happened was reanimation after apparent death. "If
+Christ had only eaten to show that He could eat, while He really had no
+need of nourishment, it would have been a pretence--something docetic. This
+gives us a clue to all the rest, teaching us to hold firmly to the way in
+which Christ intends Himself to be represented, and to put down all that
+is miraculous in the accounts of the appearances to the prepossessions of
+the disciples."
+
+When He revealed himself to Mary Magdalene He had no certainty that He
+would frequently see her again. "He was conscious that His present
+condition was that of genuine human life, but He had no confidence in its
+continuance." He bade His disciples meet Him in Galilee because He could
+there enjoy greater privacy and freedom from observation in His
+intercourse with them. The difference between the present and the past was
+only that He no longer showed Himself to the world. "It was possible that
+a movement in favour of an earthly Messianic Kingdom might break out, and
+we need only take this possibility into account in order to explain
+completely why Jesus remained in such close retirement." "It was the
+premonition of the approaching end of this second life which led Him to
+return from Galilee to Jerusalem."
+
+Of the ascension he says: "Here, therefore, something happened, but what
+was seen was incomplete, and has been conjecturally supplemented." The
+underlying rationalistic explanation shows through!
+
+But if the condition in which Jesus lived on after His crucifixion was "a
+condition of reanimation," by what right does Schleiermacher constantly
+speak of it as a "resurrection," as if resurrection and reanimation were
+synonymous terms? Further, is it really true that faith has no interest
+whatever in the question whether it was as risen from the dead, or merely
+as recovered from a state of suspended animation, that Jesus showed
+Himself to His disciples? In regard to this, it might seem, the
+rationalists were more straightforward.
+
+The moment one tries to take hold of this dialectic it breaks in one's
+fingers. Schleiermacher would not indeed have ventured to play so risky a
+game if he had not had a second position to retire to, based on the
+distinction between the Synoptic and the Johannine miracle stories. In
+this respect he simplified matters for himself, as compared with the
+rationalists, even more than Hase. The miracle at the baptism is only
+intelligible in the narrative of the Fourth Gospel, where it is not a
+question of an external occurrence, but of a purely subjective experience
+of John, with which we have nothing to do. The Synoptic story of the
+temptation has no intelligible meaning. "To change stones into bread, if
+there were need for it, would not have been a sin." "A leap from the
+Temple could have had no attraction for any one."
+
+The miracles of the birth and childhood are given up without hesitation;
+they do not belong to the story of the life of Jesus; and it is the same
+with the miracles at His death. One might fancy it was Strauss speaking
+when Schleiermacher says: "If we give due consideration to the fact that
+we have certainly found in these for the most part simple narratives of
+the last moments of Christ two incidents, such as the rending of the veil
+of the Temple and the opening of the graves, in reference to which we
+cannot possibly suppose that they are literal descriptions of actual
+facts, then we are bound to ask the question whether the same does not
+apply to many other points. Certainly the mention of the sun's light
+failing and the consequent great darkness looks very much as if it had
+been imported by poetic imagination into the simple narrative."
+
+A rebuke could have no possible effect upon the wind and sea. Here we must
+suppose either an alteration of the facts or a different causal connexion.
+
+In this way Schleiermacher--and it was for this reason that these lectures
+on the life of Jesus became so celebrated--enabled dogmatics, though not
+indeed history, to take a flying leap over the miracle question.
+
+What is chiefly fatal to a sound historical view is his one-sided
+preference for the Fourth Gospel. It is, according to him, only in this
+Gospel that the consciousness of Jesus is truly reflected. In this
+connexion he expressly remarks that of a progress in the teaching of
+Jesus, and of any "development" in Him, there can be no question. His
+development is the unimpeded organic unfolding of the idea of the Divine
+Sonship.
+
+For the outline of the life of Jesus, also, the Fourth Gospel is alone
+authoritative. "The Johannine representation of the way in which the
+crisis of His fate was brought about is the only clear one." The same
+applies to the narrative of the resurrection in this Gospel. "Accordingly,
+on this point also," so he concludes his discussion, "I take it as
+established that the Gospel of John is the narrative of an eyewitness and
+forms an organic whole. The first three Gospels are compilations formed
+out of various narratives which had arisen independently; their discourses
+are composite structures, and their presentation of the history is such
+that one can form no idea of the grouping of events." The "crowded days,"
+such as that of the sermon on the mount and the day of the parables, exist
+only in the imagination of the Evangelists. In reality there were no such
+days. Luke is the only one of them who has some semblance of historical
+order. His Gospel is compiled with much insight and critical tact out of a
+number of independent documents, as Schleiermacher believed himself to
+have shown convincingly in his critical study of Luke's Gospel, published
+in 1817.
+
+It is only on the ground of such a valuation of the sources that we can
+arrive at a just estimate of the different representations of the locality
+of the life of Jesus. "The contradictions," Schleiermacher proceeds,
+"could not be explained if all our Gospels stood equally close to Jesus.
+But if John stands closer than the others, we may perhaps find the key in
+the fact that John, too, mentions it as a prevailing opinion in Jerusalem
+that Jesus was a Galilaean, and that Luke, when he has got to the end of
+the sections which show skilful arrangement and are united by similarity
+of subject, gathers all the rest into the framework of a journey to
+Jerusalem. Following this analogy, and not remembering that Jesus had
+occasion to go several times a year to Jerusalem, the other two gathered
+into one mass all that happened there on various occasions. This could
+only have been done by Hellenists."(26)
+
+Schleiermacher is quite insensible to the graphic realism of the
+description of the last days at Jerusalem in Mark and Matthew, and has no
+suspicion that if only a single one of the Jerusalem sayings in the
+Synoptists is true Jesus had never before spoken in Jerusalem.
+
+The ground of Schleiermacher's antipathy to the Synoptists lies deeper
+than a mere critical view as to their composition. The fact is that their
+"picture of Christ" does not agree with that which he wishes to insert
+into the history. When it serves his purpose, he does not shrink from the
+most arbitrary violence. He abolishes the scene in Gethsemane because he
+infers from the silence of John that it cannot have taken place. "The
+other Evangelists," he explains, "give us an account of a sudden
+depression and deep distress of spirit which fell upon Jesus, and which He
+admitted to His disciples, and they tell us how He sought relief from it
+in prayer, and afterwards recovered His serenity and resolution. John
+passes over this in silence, and his narrative of what immediately
+precedes is not consistent with it." It is evidently a symbolical story,
+as the thrice-repeated petition shows. "If they speak of such a depression
+of spirit, they have given the story that form in order that the example
+of Christ might be the more applicable to others in similar
+circumstances."
+
+On these premises it is possible to write a Life of Christ; it is not
+possible to write a Life of Jesus. It is, therefore, not by accident that
+Schleiermacher regularly speaks, not of Jesus, but of Christ.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII. DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS--THE MAN AND HIS FATE
+
+
+In order to understand Strauss one must love him. He was not the greatest,
+and not the deepest, of theologians, but he was the most absolutely
+sincere. His insight and his errors were alike the insight and the errors
+of a prophet. And he had a prophet's fate. Disappointment and suffering
+gave his life its consecration. It unrolls itself before us like a
+tragedy, in which, in the end, the gloom is lightened by the mild radiance
+which shines forth from the nobility of the sufferer.
+
+Strauss was born in 1808 at Ludwigsburg. His father was a merchant, whose
+business, however, was unsuccessful, so that his means steadily declined.
+The boy took his ability from his mother, a good, self-controlled,
+sensible, pious woman, to whom he raised a monument in his "Memorial of a
+Good Mother" written in 1858, to be given to his daughter on her
+confirmation-day.
+
+From 1821 to 1825 he was a pupil at the "lower seminary" at Blaubeuren,
+along with Friedrich Vischer, Pfizer, Zimmermann, Maerklin, and Binder.
+Among their teachers was Ferdinand Christian Baur, whom they were to meet
+with again at the university.
+
+His first year at the university was uninteresting, as it was only in the
+following year that the reorganisation of the theological faculty took
+place, in consequence of the appointment of Baur. The instruction in the
+philosophical faculty was almost equally unsatisfactory, so that the
+friends would have gained little from the two years of philosophical
+propaedeutic which formed part of the course prescribed for theological
+students, if they had not combined to prosecute their philosophical
+studies for themselves. The writings of Hegel began to exercise a powerful
+influence upon them. For the philosophical faculty, Hegel's philosophy was
+as yet non-existent.
+
+These student friends were much addicted to poetry. Two journeys which
+Strauss made along with his fellow-student Binder to Weinsberg to see
+Justinus Kerner made a deep impression upon him. He had to make a
+deliberate effort to escape from the dream-world of the "Prophetess of
+Prevorst." Some years later, in a Latin note to Binder, he speaks of
+Weinsberg as "Mecca nostra."(27)
+
+According to Vischer's picture of him, the tall stripling made an
+impression of great charm, though he was rather shy except with intimates.
+He attended lectures with pedantic regularity.
+
+Baur was at that time still immersed in the prolegomena to his system; but
+Strauss already suspected the direction which the thoughts of his young
+teacher were to take.
+
+When Strauss and his student friends entered on their duties as clergymen,
+the others found great difficulty in bringing their theological views into
+line with the popular beliefs which they were expected to preach. Strauss
+alone remained free from inner struggles. In a letter to Binder(28) of the
+year 1831, he explains that in his sermons--he was then assistant at Klein-
+Ingersheim near Ludwigsburg--he did not use "representative notions"
+(_Vorstellungen_, used as a philosophical technicality) such as that of
+the Devil, which the people were already prepared to dispense with; but
+others which still appeared to be indispensable, such as those of an
+eschatological character, he merely endeavoured to present in such a way
+that the "intellectual concept" (_Begriff_) which lay behind, might so far
+as possible shine through. "When I consider," he continues, "how far even
+in intellectual preaching the expression is inadequate to the true essence
+of the concept, it does not seem to me to matter much if one goes even a
+step further. I at least go about the matter without the least scruple,
+and cannot ascribe this to a mere want of sincerity in myself."
+
+That is Hegelian logic.
+
+After being for a short time Deputy-professor at Maulbronn, he took his
+doctor's degree with a dissertation on the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}
+(restoration of all things, Acts iii. 21). This work is lost. From his
+letters it appears that he treated the subject chiefly from the religious-
+historical point of view.(29)
+
+When Binder took his doctorate with a philosophical thesis on the
+immortality of the soul, Strauss, in 1832, wrote to him expressing the
+opinion that the belief in personal immortality could not properly be
+regarded as a consequence of the Hegelian system, since according to
+Hegel, it was not the subjective spirit of the individual person, but only
+the objective Spirit, the self-realising Idea which constantly embodies
+itself in new creations, to which immortality belongs.(30)
+
+In October 1831 he went to Berlin to hear Hegel and Schleiermacher. On the
+14th of November Hegel, whom he had visited shortly before, was carried
+off by cholera. Strauss heard the news in Schleiermacher's house, from
+Schleiermacher himself, and is said to have exclaimed, with a certain want
+of tact, considering who his informant was: "And it was to hear him that I
+came to Berlin!"
+
+There was no satisfactory basis for a relationship between Schleiermacher
+and Strauss. They had nothing in common. That did not prevent Strauss's
+Life of Jesus being sometimes described by opponents of Schleiermacher as
+a product of the latter's philosophy of religion. Indeed, as late as the
+'sixties, Tholuck thought it necessary to defend the memory of the great
+theologian against this reproach.
+
+As a matter of fact, the plan of the Life of Jesus arose during Strauss's
+intercourse with Vatke, to whom he felt himself strongly drawn. Moreover,
+what was first sketched out was not primarily the plan of a Life of Jesus,
+but that of a history of the ideas of primitive Christianity, intended to
+serve as a standard by which to judge ecclesiastical dogma. The Life of
+Jesus was originally designed, it might almost be said, as a mere prologue
+to this work, the plan of which was subsequently carried out under the
+title, "Christian Theology in its Historical Development and in its
+Antagonism with Modern Scientific Knowledge" (published in 1840-1841).
+
+When in the spring of 1832 he returned to Tuebingen to take up the position
+of "Repetent"(31) in the theological college (_Stift_), these plans were
+laid on the shelf in consequence of his pre-occupation with philosophy,
+and if things had gone according to Strauss's wishes, they would perhaps
+never have come to fulfilment. The "Repetents" had the right to lecture
+upon philosophy. Strauss felt himself called upon to come forward as an
+apostle of Hegel, and lectured upon Hegel's logic with tremendous success.
+Zeller, who attended these lectures, records the unforgettable impression
+which they made on him. Besides championing Hegel, Strauss also lectured
+upon Plato, and upon the history of modern philosophy. These were three
+happy semesters.
+
+"In my theology," he writes in a letter of 1833,(32) "philosophy occupies
+such a predominant position that my theological views can only be worked
+out to completeness by means of a more thorough study of philosophy, and
+this course of study I am now going to prosecute uninterruptedly and
+without concerning myself whether it leads me back to theology or not."
+Further on he says: "If I know myself rightly, my position in regard to
+theology is that what interests me in theology causes offence, and what
+does not cause offence is indifferent to me. For this reason I have
+refrained from delivering lectures on theology."
+
+The philosophical faculty was not altogether pleased at the success of the
+apostle of Hegel, and wished to have the right of the "Repetents" to
+lecture on philosophy curtailed. The latter, however, took their stand
+upon the tradition. Strauss was desired to intermit his lectures until the
+matter should be settled. He would have liked best to end the situation by
+entering the philosophical faculty. The other "Repetents," however, begged
+him not to do so, but to continue to champion their rights. It is possible
+also that obstacles were placed in the way of his plan by the
+philosophical faculty. However that may be, it was in any case not carried
+through. Strauss was forced back upon theology.
+
+According to Hase,(33) Strauss began his studies for the Life of Jesus by
+writing a detailed critical review of his (Hase's) text-book. He sent this
+to Berlin to the _Jahrbuecher fuer wissenschaftliche Kritik_, which,
+however, refused it. His resolve to publish first, instead of the general
+work on the genesis of Christian doctrine, a critical study on the life of
+Jesus was doubtless determined by Schleiermacher's lectures on this
+subject. When in Berlin he had procured a copy of a lecture note-book, and
+the reading of it incited him to opposition.
+
+Considering its character, the work was rapidly produced. He wrote it
+sitting at the window of the Repetents' room, which looks out upon the
+gateway-arch. When its two volumes appeared in 1835 the name of the author
+was wholly unknown, except for some critical studies upon the Gospels.
+This book, into which he had poured his youthful enthusiasm, rendered him
+famous in a moment--and utterly destroyed his prospects. Among his
+opponents the most prominent was Steudel, a member of the theological
+faculty, who, as president of the _Stift_, made representations against
+him to the Ministry, and succeeded in securing his removal from the post
+of "Repetent." The hopes which Strauss had placed upon his friends were
+disappointed. Only two or three at most dared to publish anything in his
+defence.
+
+He first accepted a transfer to the post of Deputy-professor at
+Ludwigsburg, but in less than a year he was glad to give it up, and he
+then returned to Stuttgart. There he lived for several years, busying
+himself in the preparation of new editions of the Life of Jesus, and in
+writing answers to the attacks which were made upon him.
+
+Towards the end of the 'thirties he became conscious of a growing impulse
+towards more positive views. The criticisms of his opponents had made some
+impression upon him. The second volume of polemics was laid aside. In its
+place appeared the third edition of the Life of Jesus, 1838-1839,
+containing a series of amazing concessions. Strauss explains that in
+consequence of reading de Wette's commentary and Neander's Life of Jesus
+he had begun to feel some hesitation about his former doubts regarding the
+genuineness and credibility of the Fourth Gospel. The historic personality
+of Jesus again began to take on intelligible outlines for him. These
+inconsistencies he removed in the next edition, acknowledging that he did
+not know how he could so have temporarily vacillated in his point of view.
+The matter admits, however, of a psychological explanation. He longed for
+peace, for he had suffered more than his enemies suspected or his friends
+knew. The ban of the outlaw lay heavy upon his soul. In this spirit he
+composed in 1839 the monologues entitled _Vergaengliches und Bleibendes im
+Christentum_ ("Transient and Permanent Elements in Christianity"), which
+appeared again in the following year under the title _Friedliche Blaetter_
+("Leaves of Peace").
+
+For a moment it seemed as though his rehabilitation would be accomplished.
+In January 1839 the noble-minded Hitzig succeeded in getting him appointed
+to the vacant chair of dogmatics in Zurich. But the orthodox and pietist
+parties protested so vehemently that the Government was obliged to revoke
+the appointment. Strauss was pensioned off, without ever entering on his
+office.
+
+About that time his mother died. In 1841 he lost his father. When the
+estate came to be settled up, it was found that his affairs were in a less
+unsatisfactory condition than had been feared. Strauss was secure against
+want. The success of his second great work, his "Christian Theology"
+(published in 1840-41), compensated him for his disappointment at Zurich.
+In conception it is perhaps even greater than the Life of Jesus; and in
+depth of thought it is to be classed with the most important contributions
+to theology. In spite of that it never attracted so much attention as the
+earlier work. Strauss continued to be known as the author of the Life of
+Jesus. Any further ground of offence which he might give was regarded as
+quite subsidiary.
+
+And the book contains matter for offence in no common degree. The point to
+which Strauss applies his criticism is the way in which the Christian
+theology which grew out of the ideas of the ancient world has been brought
+into harmony with the Christianity of rationalism and of speculative
+philosophy. Either, to use his own expression, both are so finely
+pulverised in the process--as in the case of Schleiermacher's combination
+of Spinozism with Christianity--that it needs a sharp eye to rediscover the
+elements of the mixture; or the two are shaken together like water and
+oil, in which case the semblance of combination is only maintained so long
+as the shaking continues. For this crude procedure he desires to
+substitute a better method, based upon a preliminary historical criticism
+of dogma, in order that thought may no longer have to deal with the
+present form of Church theology, but with the ideas which worked as living
+forces in its formation.
+
+This is brilliantly worked out in detail. The result is not a positive,
+but a negative Hegelian theology. Religion is not concerned with supra-
+mundane beings and a divinely glorious future, but with present spiritual
+realities which appear as "moments" in the eternal being and becoming of
+Absolute Spirit. At the end of the second volume, where battle is joined
+on the issue of personal immortality, all these ideas play their part in
+the struggle. Personal immortality is finally rejected in every form, for
+the critical reasons which Strauss had already set forth in the letters of
+1832. Immortality is not something which stretches out into the future,
+but simply and solely the present quality of the spirit, its inner
+universality, its power of rising above everything finite to the Idea.
+Here the thought of Hegel coincides with that of Schleiermacher. "The
+saying of Schleiermacher, 'In the midst of finitude to be one with the
+Infinite, and to be eternal in a moment,' is all that modern thought can
+say about immortality." But neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel was willing
+to draw the natural inferences from their ultimate position, or at least
+they did not give them any prominence.
+
+It is not the application of the mythological explanation to the Gospel
+history which irrevocably divides Strauss from the theologians, but the
+question of personal immortality. It would be well for them if they had
+only to deal with the Strauss of the Life of Jesus, and not with the
+thinker who posed this question with inexorable trenchancy. They might
+then face the future more calmly, relieved of the anxiety lest once more
+Hegel and Schleiermacher might rise up in some pious but critical spirit,
+not to speak smooth things, but to ask the ultimate questions, and might
+force theology to fight its battle with Strauss all over again.
+
+At the very time when Strauss was beginning to breathe freely once more,
+had turned his back upon all attempts at compromise, and reconciled
+himself to giving up teaching; and when, after settling his father's
+affairs, he had the certainty of being secure against penury; at that very
+time he sowed for himself the seeds of a new, immitigable suffering by his
+marriage with Agnese Schebest, the famous singer.
+
+They were not made for one another. He could not look to her for any
+sympathy with his plans, and she on her part was repelled by the pedantry
+of his disposition. Housekeeping difficulties and the trials of a limited
+income added another element of discord. They removed to Sontheim near
+Heilbronn with the idea of learning to adapt themselves to one another far
+from the distractions of the town; but that did not better matters. They
+lived apart for a time, and after some years they procured a divorce,
+custody of the children being assigned to the father. The lady took up her
+residence in Stuttgart, and Strauss paid her an allowance up to her death
+in 1870.
+
+What he suffered may be read between the lines in the passage in "The Old
+Faith and the New" where he speaks of the sacredness of marriage and the
+admissibility of divorce. The wound bled inwardly. His mental powers were
+disabled. At this time he wrote little. Only in the apologue "Julian the
+Apostate, or the Romanticist on the throne of the Caesars"--that brilliant
+satire upon Frederic William IV., written in 1847--is there a flash of the
+old spirit.
+
+But in spite of his antipathy to the romantic disposition of the King of
+Prussia he entered the lists in 1848 on behalf of the efforts of the
+smaller German states to form a united Germany, apart from Austria, under
+the hegemony of Prussia. He did not suffer his political acumen to be
+blunted either by personal antipathies or by particularism. The citizens
+of Ludwigsburg wished to have him as their representative in the Frankfort
+parliament, but the rural population, who were pietistic in sympathies,
+defeated his candidature. Instead, his native town sent him to the
+Wuertemberg Chamber of Deputies. But here his philistinism came to the fore
+again. The phrase-mongering revolutionary party in the chamber disgusted
+him. He saw himself more and more forced to the "right," and was obliged
+to act politically with men whose reactionary sympathies he was far from
+sharing. His constituents, meanwhile, were thoroughly discontented with
+his attitude. In the end the position became intolerable. It was also
+painful to him to have to reside in Stuttgart, where he could not avoid
+meeting the woman who had brought so much misery into his life. Further--he
+himself mentions this point in his memoirs--he had no practice in speaking
+without manuscript, and cut a poor figure as a debater. Then came the
+"Blum Case." Robert Blum, a revolutionary, had been shot by court martial
+in Vienna. The Wuertemberg Chamber desired to vote a public celebration of
+his funeral. Strauss did not think there was any ground for making a hero
+of this agitator, merely because he had been shot, and was not inclined to
+blame the Austrian Government very severely for meting out summary justice
+to a disturber of the peace. His attitude brought on him a vote of censure
+from his constituents. When, subsequently, the President of the Chamber
+called him to order for asserting that a previous speaker had "concealed
+by sleight of hand" (_wegeskamotiert_, "juggled away") an important point
+in the debate, he refused to accept the vote of censure, resigned his
+membership, and ceased to attend the diets. As he himself put it, he
+"jumped out of the boat." Then began a period of restless wandering,
+during which he beguiled his time with literary work. He wrote, _inter
+alia_, upon Lessing, Hutten, and Reimarus, rediscovering the last-named
+for his fellow-countrymen.
+
+At the end of the 'sixties he returned once more to theology. His "Life of
+Jesus adapted for the German People" appeared in 1864. In the preface he
+refers to Renan, and freely acknowledges the great merits of his work.
+
+The Prusso-Austrian war placed him in a difficult position. His historical
+insight made it impossible for him to share the particularism of his
+friends; on the contrary, he recognised that the way was now being
+prepared for the realisation of his dream of 1848--an alliance of the
+smaller German States under the hegemony of Prussia. As he made no secret
+of his opinions, he had the bitter experience of receiving the cold
+shoulder from men who had hitherto loyally stood by him.
+
+In the year 1870 it was granted to him to become the spokesman of the
+German people; through a publication on Voltaire which had appeared not
+long before he had become acquainted with Renan. In a letter to Strauss,
+written after the first battles, Renan made a passing allusion to these
+great events. Strauss seized the opportunity to explain to him, in a
+vigorous "open letter" of the 12th of August, Germany's reason and
+justification for going to war. Receiving an answer from Renan, he then,
+in a second letter, of the 29th of September, took occasion to defend
+Germany's right to demand the cession of Alsace, not on the ground of its
+having formerly been German territory, but for the defence of her natural
+frontiers. The resounding echo evoked by these words, inspired, as they
+were, by the enthusiasm of the moment, compensated him for much of the
+obloquy which he had had to bear.
+
+His last work, "The Old Faith and the New," appeared in 1872. Once more,
+as in the work on theology published in 1840-1841, he puts to himself the
+question, What is there of permanence in this artificial compound of
+theology and philosophy, faith and thought? But he puts the question with
+a certain bitterness, and shows himself too much under the influence of
+Darwinism, by which his mind was at that time dominated. The Hegelian
+system of thought, which served as a firm basis for the work of 1840, has
+fallen in ruins. Strauss is alone with his own thoughts, endeavouring to
+raise himself above the new scientific world-view. His powers of thought,
+never, for all his critical acumen, strong on the creative side, and now
+impaired by age, were unequal to the task. There is no force and no
+greatness in the book.
+
+To the question, "Are we still Christians?" he answers, "No." But to his
+second question, "Have we still a religion?" he is prepared to give an
+affirmative answer, if the assumption is granted that the feeling of
+dependence, of self-surrender, of inner freedom, which has sprung from the
+pantheistic world-view, can be called religion. But instead of developing
+the idea of this deep inner freedom, and presenting religion in the form
+in which he had experienced it, he believes himself obliged to offer some
+new construction based upon Darwinism, and sets himself to answer the two
+questions, "How are we to understand the world?" and "How are we to
+regulate our lives?"--the form of the latter is somewhat lacking in
+distinction--in a quite impersonal way. It is only the schoolmaster and
+pedant in him--who was always at the elbow of the thinker even in his
+greatest works--that finds expression here.
+
+It was a dead book, in spite of the many editions which it went through,
+and the battle which raged over it was, like the fiercest of the Homeric
+battles, a combat over the dead.
+
+The theologians declared Strauss bankrupt, and felt themselves rich
+because they had made sure of not being ruined by a similar unimaginative
+honesty. Friedrich Nietzsche, from the height of his would-be
+Schopenhauerian pessimism, mocked at the fallen hero.
+
+Before the year was out Strauss began to suffer from an internal ulcer.
+For many months he bore his sufferings with quiet resignation and inner
+serenity, until on the 8th of February 1874, in his native town of
+Ludwigsburg, death set him free.
+
+A few weeks earlier, on the 29th of December 1873, his sufferings and his
+thoughts received illuminating expression in the following poignant
+verses:--
+
+
+    Wem ich dieses klage,
+    Weiss, ich klage nicht;
+    Der ich dieses sage,
+    Fuehlt, ich zage nicht.
+
+    Heute heisst's verglimmen,
+    Wie ein Licht verglimmt,
+    In die Luft verschwimmen,
+    Wie ein Ton verschwimmt.
+
+    Moege schwach wie immer,
+    Aber hell und rein,
+    Dieser letzte Schimmer
+    Dieser Ton nur sein.(34)
+
+
+He was buried on a stormy February day.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII. STRAUSS'S FIRST "LIFE OF JESUS"
+
+
+    First edition, 1835 and 1836. 2 vols. 1480 pp.
+    The second edition was unaltered.
+    Third edition, with alterations, 1838-1839.
+    Fourth edition, agreeing with the first, 1840.
+
+
+Considered as a literary work, Strauss's first Life of Jesus is one of the
+most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature. In over
+fourteen hundred pages he has not a superfluous phrase; his analysis
+descends to the minutest details, but he does not lose his way among them;
+the style is simple and picturesque, sometimes ironical, but always
+dignified and distinguished.
+
+In regard to the application of the mythological explanation to Holy
+Scripture, Strauss points out that De Wette, Eichhorn, Gabler, and others
+of his predecessors had long ago freely applied it to the Old Testament,
+and that various attempts had been made to portray the life of Jesus in
+accordance with the critical assumptions upon which his undertaking was
+based. He mentions especially Usteri as one who had helped to prepare the
+way for him. The distinction between Strauss and those who had preceded
+him upon this path consists only in this, that prior to him the conception
+of myth was neither truly grasped nor consistently applied. Its
+application was confined to the account of Jesus' coming into the world
+and of His departure from it, while the real kernel of the evangelical
+tradition--the sections from the Baptism to the Resurrection--was left
+outside the field of its application. Myth formed, to use Strauss's
+illustration, the lofty gateways at the entrance to, and at the exit from,
+the Gospel history; between these two lofty gateways lay the narrow and
+crooked streets of the naturalistic explanation.
+
+The principal obstacle, Strauss continues, which barred the way to a
+comprehensive application of myth, consisted in the supposition that two
+of our Gospels, Matthew and John, were reports of eyewitnesses; and a
+further difficulty was the offence caused by the word myth, owing to its
+associations with the heathen mythology. But that any of our Evangelists
+was an eyewitness, or stood in such relations with eyewitnesses as to make
+the intrusion of myth unthinkable, is a thesis which there is no extant
+evidence sufficient to prove. Even though the earthly life of the Lord
+falls within historic times, and even if only a generation be assumed to
+have elapsed between His death and the composition of the Gospels; such a
+period would be sufficient to allow the historical material to become
+intermixed with myth. No sooner is a great man dead than legend is busy
+with his life.
+
+Then, too, the offence of the word myth disappears for any one who has
+gained an insight into the essential character of religious myth. It is
+nothing else than the clothing in historic form of religious ideas, shaped
+by the unconsciously inventive power of legend, and embodied in a historic
+personality. Even on a priori grounds we are almost compelled to assume
+that the historic Jesus will meet us in the garb of old Testament
+Messianic ideas and primitive Christian expectations.
+
+The main distinction between Strauss and his predecessors consisted in the
+fact that they asked themselves anxiously how much of the historical life
+of Jesus would remain as a foundation for religion if they dared to apply
+the conception of myth consistently, while for him this question had no
+terrors. He claims in his preface that he possessed one advantage over all
+the critical and learned theologians of his time without which nothing can
+be accomplished in the domain of history--the inner emancipation of thought
+and feeling in regard to certain religious and dogmatic prepossessions
+which he had early attained as a result of his philosophic studies.
+Hegel's philosophy had set him free, giving him a clear conception of the
+relationship of idea and reality, leading him to a higher plane of
+Christological speculation, and opening his eyes to the mystic
+interpenetration of finitude and infinity, God and man.
+
+God-manhood, the highest idea conceived by human thought, is actually
+realised in the historic personality of Jesus. But while conventional
+thinking supposes that this phenomenal realisation must be perfect, true
+thought, which has attained by genuine critical reasoning to a higher
+freedom, knows that no idea can realise itself perfectly on the historic
+plane, and that its truth does not depend on the proof of its having
+received perfect external representation, but that its perfection comes
+about through that which the idea carries into history, or through the way
+in which history is sublimated into idea. For this reason it is in the
+last analysis indifferent to what extent God-manhood has been realised in
+the person of Jesus; the important thing is that the idea is now alive in
+the common consciousness of those who have been prepared to receive it by
+its manifestation in sensible form, and of whose thought and imagination
+that historical personality took such complete possession, that for them
+the unity of Godhood and manhood assumed in Him enters into the common
+consciousness, and the "moments" which constitute the outward course of
+His life reproduce themselves in them in a spiritual fashion.
+
+A purely historical presentation of the life of Jesus was in that first
+period wholly impossible; what was operative was a creative reminiscence
+acting under the impulse of the idea which the personality of Jesus had
+called to life among mankind. And this idea of God-manhood, the
+realisation of which in every personality is the ultimate goal of
+humanity, is the eternal reality in the Person of Jesus, which no
+criticism can destroy.
+
+However far criticism may go in proving the reaction of the idea upon the
+presentment of the historical course of the life of Jesus, the fact that
+Jesus represented that idea and called it to life among mankind is
+something real, something that no criticism can annul. It is alive
+thenceforward--to this day, and for ever more.
+
+It is in this emancipation of spirit, and in the consciousness that Jesus
+as the creator of the religion of humanity is beyond the reach of
+criticism, that Strauss goes to work, and batters down the rubble, assured
+that his pick can make no impression on the stone. He sees evidence that
+the time has come for this undertaking in the condition of exhaustion
+which characterised contemporary theology. The supernaturalistic
+explanation of the events of the life of Jesus had been followed by the
+rationalistic, the one making everything supernatural, the other setting
+itself to make all the events intelligible as natural occurrences. Each
+had said all that it had to say. From their opposition now arises a new
+solution--the mythological interpretation. This is a characteristic example
+of the Hegelian method--the _synthesis_ of a _thesis_ represented by the
+supernaturalistic explanation with an _antithesis_ represented by the
+rationalistic interpretation.
+
+Strauss's Life of Jesus is, therefore, like Schleiermacher's, the product
+of antithetic conceptions. But whereas in the latter the antitheses
+Docetism and Ebionism are simply limiting conceptions, between which his
+view is statically suspended, the synthesis with which Strauss operates
+represents a composition of forces, of which his view is the dynamic
+resultant. The dialectic is in the one case descriptive, in the other
+creative. This Hegelian dialectic determines the method of the work. Each
+incident of the life of Jesus is considered separately; first as
+supernaturally explained, and then as rationalistically explained, and the
+one explanation is refuted by the other. "By this means," says Strauss in
+his preface, "the incidental advantage is secured that the work is fitted
+to serve as a repertory of the leading views and discussions of all parts
+of the Gospel history."
+
+In every case the whole range of representative opinions is reviewed.
+Finally the forced interpretations necessitated by the naturalistic
+explanation of the narrative under discussion drives the reader back upon
+the supernaturalistic. That had been recognised by Hase and
+Schleiermacher, and they had felt themselves obliged to make a place for
+inexplicable supernatural elements alongside of the historic elements of
+the life of Jesus. Contemporaneously there had sprung up in all directions
+new attempts to return by the aid of a mystical philosophy to the
+supernaturalistic point of view of our forefathers. But in these Strauss
+recognises only the last desperate efforts to make the past present and to
+conceive the inconceivable; and in direct opposition to the reactionary
+ineptitudes by means of which critical theology was endeavouring to work
+its way out of rationalism, he sets up the hypothesis that these
+inexplicable elements are mythical.
+
+In the stories prior to the baptism, everything is myth. The narratives
+are woven on the pattern of Old Testament prototypes, with modifications
+due to Messianic or messianically interpreted passages. Since Jesus and
+the Baptist came into contact with one another later, it is felt necessary
+to represent their parents as having been connected. The attempts to
+construct Davidic genealogies for Jesus, show us that there was a period
+in the formation of the Gospel History during which the Lord was simply
+regarded as the son of Joseph and Mary, otherwise genealogical studies of
+this kind would not have been undertaken. Even in the story of the twelve-
+year-old Jesus in the temple, there is scarcely more than a trace of
+historical material.
+
+In the narrative of the baptism we may take it as certainly unhistorical
+that the Baptist received a revelation of the Messianic dignity of Jesus,
+otherwise he could not later have come to doubt this. Whether his message
+to Jesus is historical must be left an open question; its possibility
+depends on whether the nature of his confinement admitted of such
+communication with the outer world. Might not a natural reluctance to
+allow the Baptist to depart this life without at least a dawning
+recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus have here led to the insertion of
+a legendary trait into the tradition? If so, the historical residuum would
+be that Jesus was for a time one of the adherents of the Baptist, and was
+baptized by him, and that He soon afterwards appeared in Galilee with the
+same message which John had proclaimed, and even when He had outgrown his
+influence, never ceased to hold John in high esteem, as is shown by the
+eulogy which He pronounced upon him. But if the baptism of John was a
+baptism of repentance with a view to "him who was to come," Jesus cannot
+have held Himself to be sinless when He submitted to it. Otherwise we
+should have to suppose that He did it merely for appearance' sake. Whether
+it was in the moment of the baptism that the consciousness of His
+Messiahship dawned upon Him, we cannot tell. This only is certain, that
+the conception of Jesus as having been endowed with the Spirit at His
+baptism, was independent of, and earlier than, that other conception which
+held Him to have been supernaturally born of the Spirit. We have,
+therefore, in the Synoptists several different strata of legend and
+narrative, which in some cases intersect and in some are superimposed one
+upon the other.
+
+The story of the temptation is equally unsatisfactory, whether it be
+interpreted as supernatural, or as symbolical either of an inward struggle
+or of external events (as for example in Venturini's interpretation of it,
+where the part of the Tempter is played by a Pharisee); it is simply
+primitive Christian legend, woven together out of Old Testament
+suggestions.
+
+The call of the first disciples cannot have happened as it is narrated,
+without their having known anything of Jesus beforehand; the manner of the
+call is modelled upon the call of Elisha by Elijah. The further legend
+attached to it--Peter's miraculous draught of fishes--has arisen out of the
+saying about "fishers of men," and the same idea is reflected, at a
+different angle of refraction, in John xxi. The mission of the seventy is
+unhistorical.
+
+Whether the cleansing of the temple is historical, or whether it arose out
+of a Messianic application of the text, "My house shall be called a house
+of prayer," cannot be determined. The difficulty of forming a clear idea
+of the circumstances is not easily to be removed. How freely the
+historical material has been worked up, is seen in the groups of stories
+which have grown out of a single incident; as, for example, the anointing
+of Jesus at Bethany by an unknown woman, out of which Luke has made an
+anointing by a penitent sinner, and John an anointing by Mary of Bethany.
+
+As regards the healings, some of them are certainly historical, but not in
+the form in which tradition has preserved them. The recognition of Jesus
+as Messiah by the demons immediately arouses suspicion. It is doubtless
+rather to be ascribed to the tendency which grew up later to represent Him
+as receiving, in His Messianic character, homage even from the world of
+evil spirits, than to any advantage in respect of clearness of insight
+which distinguished the mentally deranged, in comparison with their
+contemporaries. The cure of the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum may
+well be historical, but, in other cases, the procedure is so often raised
+into the region of the miraculous that a psychical influence of Jesus upon
+the sufferer no longer suffices to explain it; the creative activity of
+legend must have come in to confuse the account of what really happened.
+
+One cure has sometimes given rise to three or four narratives. Sometimes
+we can still recognise the influences which have contributed to mould a
+story. When, for example, the disciples are unable to heal the lunatic boy
+during Jesus' absence on the Mount of Transfiguration, we are reminded of
+2 Kings iv., where Elisha's servant Gehazi tries in vain to bring the dead
+boy to life by using the staff of the prophet. The immediate healing of
+leprosy has its prototype in the story of Naaman the Syrian. The story of
+the ten lepers shows so clearly a didactic tendency that its historic
+value is thereby rendered doubtful.
+
+The cures of blindness all go back to the case of the blind man at
+Jericho. But who can say how far this is itself historical? The cures of
+paralytics, too, belong rather to the equipment of the Messiah than to
+history. The cures through touching clothes, and the healings at a
+distance, have myth written on their foreheads. The fact is, the Messiah
+must equal, nay, surpass, the deeds of the prophets. That is why raisings
+from the dead figure among His miracles.
+
+The nature miracles, over a collection of which Strauss puts the heading
+"Sea-Stories and Fish-Stories," have a much larger admixture of the
+mythical. His opponents took him severely to task for this irreverent
+superscription.
+
+The repetition of the story of the feeding of the multitude arouses
+suspicion regarding the credibility of what is narrated, and at once
+invalidates the hypothesis of the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of
+Matthew. Moreover, the incident was so naturally suggested by Old
+Testament examples that it would have been a miracle if such a story had
+not found its way into the Life of Jesus. An explanation on the analogy of
+an expedited process of nature, is here, as in the case of the miracle at
+Cana also, to be absolutely rejected. Strauss allows it to be laughed out
+of court. The cursing of the fig-tree and its fulfilment go back in some
+way or other to a parable of Jesus, which was afterwards made into
+history.
+
+More important than the miracles heretofore mentioned are those which have
+to do with Jesus Himself and mark the crises of His history. The
+transfiguration had to find a place in the life of Jesus, because of the
+shining of Moses' countenance. In dealing with the narratives of the
+resurrection it is evident that we must distinguish two different strata
+of legend, an older one, represented by Matthew, which knew only of
+appearances in Galilee, and a later, in which the Galilaean appearances
+are excluded in favour of appearances in Jerusalem. In both cases,
+however, the narratives are mythical. In any attempt to explain them we
+are forced on one horn of the dilemma or the other--if the resurrection was
+real, the death was not real, and vice versa. That the ascension is a myth
+is self-evident.
+
+Such, and so radical, are the results at which Strauss's criticism of the
+supernaturalistic and the rationalistic explanations of the life of Jesus
+ultimately arrives.
+
+In reading Strauss's discussions one is not so much struck with their
+radical character, because of the admirable dialectic skill with which he
+shows the total impossibility of any explanation which does not take
+account of myth. On the whole, the supernaturalistic explanation, which at
+least represents the plain sense of the narratives, comes off much better
+than the rationalistic, the artificiality of which is everywhere
+remorselessly exposed.
+
+The sections which we have summarised are far from having lost their
+significance at the present day. They marked out the ground which is now
+occupied by modern critical study. And they filled in the death-
+certificates of a whole series of explanations which, at first sight, have
+all the air of being alive, but are not really so. If these continue to
+haunt present-day theology, it is only as ghosts, which can be put to
+flight by simply pronouncing the name of David Friedrich Strauss, and
+which would long ago have ceased to "walk," if the theologians who regard
+Strauss's book as obsolete would only take the trouble to read it.
+
+The results so far considered do not represent the elements of the life of
+Jesus which Strauss was prepared to accept as historical. He sought to
+make the boundaries of the mythical embrace the widest possible area; and
+it is clear that he extended them too far.
+
+For one thing, he overestimates the importance of the Old Testament
+motives in reference to the creative activity of the legend. He does not
+see that while in many cases he has shown clearly enough the source of the
+_form_ of the narrative in question, this does not suffice to explain its
+_origin_. Doubtless, there is mythical material in the story of the
+feeding of the multitude. But the existence of the story is not explained
+by referring to the manna in the desert, or the miraculous feeding of a
+multitude by Elisha.(35) The story in the Gospel has far too much
+individuality for that, and stands, moreover, in much too closely
+articulated an historical connexion. It must have as its basis some
+historical fact. It is not a myth, though there is myth in it. Similarly
+with the account of the transfiguration. The substratum of historical fact
+in the life of Jesus is much more extensive than Strauss is prepared to
+admit. Sometimes he fails to see the foundations, because he proceeds like
+an explorer who, in working on the ruins of an Assyrian city, should cover
+up the most valuable evidence with the rubbish thrown out from another
+portion of the excavations.
+
+Again, he sometimes rules out statements by assuming their impossibility
+on purely dialectical grounds, or by playing off the narratives one
+against another. The Baptist's message to Jesus is a case in point. This
+is connected with the fact that he often fails to realise the strong
+confirmation which the narratives derive from their connexion with the
+preceding and following context.
+
+That, however, was only to be expected. Who ever discovered a true
+principle without pressing its application too far?
+
+What really alarmed his contemporaries was not so much the comprehensive
+application of the mythical theory, as the general mining and sapping
+operations which they were obliged to see brought to bear upon the
+Gospels.
+
+In section after section Strauss cross-examines the reports on every
+point, down to the minutest detail, and then pronounces in what proportion
+an alloy of myth enters into each of them. In every case the decision is
+unfavourable to the Gospel of John. Strauss was the first to take this
+view. It is true that, at the end of the eighteenth century, many doubts
+as to the authenticity of this Gospel had been expressed, and
+Bretschneider, the famous General Superintendent at Gotha (1776-1848), had
+made a tentative collection of them in his _Probabilia_.(36) The essay
+made some stir at the time. But Schleiermacher threw the aegis of his
+authority over the authenticity of the Gospel, and it was the favourite
+Gospel of the rationalists because it contained fewer miracles than the
+others. Bretschneider himself declared that he had been brought to a
+better opinion through the controversy.
+
+After this episode the Johannine question had been shelved for fifteen
+years. The excitement was, therefore, all the greater when Strauss
+reopened the discussion. He was opposing a dogma of critical theology,
+which, even at the present day, is wont to defend its dogmas with a
+tenacity beyond that of the Church itself.
+
+The luminous haze of apparent circumstantiality which had hitherto
+prevented men from recognising the true character of this Gospel is
+completely dissipated. Strauss shows that the Johannine representation of
+the life of Jesus is dominated by a theory, and that its portraiture shows
+the further development of the tendencies which are perceptible even in
+the Synoptists. He shows this, for example, in the case of the Johannine
+narrative of the baptism of Jesus, in which critics had hitherto seen the
+most credible account of what occurred, pointing out that it is just in
+this pseudo-simplicity that the process of bringing Jesus and the Baptist
+into the closest possible relations reaches its limit. Similarly, in
+regard to the call of the first disciples, it is, according to Strauss, a
+later postulate that they came from the Baptist's following and were
+brought by him to the Lord. Strauss does not scruple even to assert that
+John introduces imaginary characters. If this Gospel relates fewer
+miracles, the miracles which it retains are proportionately greater; so
+great, indeed, that their absolutely miraculous character is beyond the
+shadow of doubt; and, moreover, a moral or symbolical significance is
+added.
+
+Here, therefore, it is no longer the unconscious action of legend which
+selects, creates, or groups the incidents, but a clearly-determined
+apologetic and dogmatic purpose.
+
+The question regarding the different representations of the locality and
+chronology of the life of Jesus, had always been decided, prior to
+Strauss, in favour of the Fourth Gospel. De Wette makes it an argument
+against the genuineness of Matthew's Gospel that it mistakenly confines
+the ministry of Jesus to Galilee. Strauss refuses to decide the question
+by simply weighing the chronological and geographical statements one
+against the other, lest he should be as one-sided in his own way as the
+defenders of the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel were in theirs. On this
+point, he contents himself with remarking that if Jesus had really taught
+in Jerusalem on several occasions, it is absolutely unintelligible how all
+knowledge of this could have so completely disappeared from the Synoptic
+tradition; for His going up to the Passover at which He met His death is
+there represented as His sole journey to Jerusalem. On the other hand, it
+is quite conceivable that if Jesus had only once been in Jerusalem there
+would be a tendency for legend gradually to make several journeys out of
+this one, on the natural assumption that He regularly went up to the
+Feasts, and that He would proclaim His Gospel not merely in the remote
+province, but also in the capital.
+
+From the triumphal entry to the resurrection, the difference between the
+Synoptic and Johannine narratives is so great that all attempts to
+harmonise them are to be rejected. How are we to reconcile the statement
+of the Synoptists that the ovation at the triumphal entry was offered by
+Galilaeans who accompanied him, with that of John, according to which it
+was offered by a multitude from Jerusalem which came out to welcome
+Jesus--who, moreover, according to John, was not coming from Galilee and
+Jericho--and escorted Him into the city. To suppose that there were two
+different triumphal entries is absurd.
+
+But the decision between John and the Synoptists is not based solely upon
+their representation of the facts; the decisive consideration is found in
+the ideas by which they are respectively dominated. John represents a more
+advanced stage of the mythopoeic process, inasmuch as he has substituted
+for the Jewish Messianic conception, the Greek metaphysical conception of
+the Divine Sonship, and, on the basis of his acquaintance with the
+Alexandrian Logos doctrine, even makes Jesus apply to Himself the Greek
+speculative conception of pre-existence. The writer is aware of an already
+existing danger from the side of a Gnostic docetism, and has himself an
+apologetic Christology to propound, thus fighting the Gnostics as a
+Gnostic of another kind. That he is free from eschatological conceptions
+is not, from the historical point of view, an advantage, but very much the
+reverse. He is not unacquainted with eschatology, but deliberately
+transforms it, endeavouring to substitute for the expectation of the
+Second Coming of Christ, as an external event of the future, the thought
+of His inward presence.
+
+The most decisive evidence of all is found in the farewell discourses and
+in the absence of all mention of the spiritual struggle in Gethsemane. The
+intention here is to show that Jesus not only had a foreknowledge of His
+death, but had long overcome it in anticipation, and went to meet His
+tragic fate with perfect inward serenity. That, however, is no historical
+narrative, but the final stage of reverent idealisation.
+
+The question is decided. The Gospel of John is inferior to the Synoptics
+as a historical source just in proportion as it is more strongly dominated
+than they by theological and apologetic interests. It is true that the
+assignment of the dominant motives is for Strauss's criticism mainly a
+matter of conjecture. He cannot define in detail the attitude and tendency
+of this Gospel, because the development of dogma in the second century was
+still to a great extent obscure. He himself admits that it was only
+subsequently, through the labours of Baur, that the positions which he had
+taken up in 1835 were rendered impregnable. And yet it is true to say that
+Johannine study has added in principle nothing new to what was said by
+Strauss. He recognised the decisive point. With critical acumen he
+resigned the attempt to base a decision on a comparison of the historical
+data, and allowed the theological character of the two lines of tradition
+to determine the question. Unless this is done the debate is endless, for
+an able man who has sworn allegiance to John will always find a thousand
+ways in which the Johannine data can be reconciled with those of the
+Synoptists, and is finally prepared to stake his life upon the exact point
+at which the missing account of the institution of the Lord's Supper must
+be inserted into the narrative.
+
+This changed estimate of John carries with it a reversal of the order in
+which the Gospels are supposed to have originated. Instead of John, Luke,
+Matthew, we have Matthew, Luke, and John--the first is last, and the last
+first. Strauss's unsophisticated instinct freed Matthew from the
+humiliating vassalage to which Schleiermacher's aesthetic had consigned
+him. The practice of differentiating between John and the Synoptists,
+which in the hands of Schleiermacher and Hase had been an elegant
+amusement, now received unexpected support, and it at last became possible
+for the study of the life of Jesus to go forward.
+
+But no sooner had Strauss opened up the way than he closed it again, by
+refusing to admit the priority of Mark. His attitude towards this Gospel
+at once provokes opposition. For him Mark is an epitomising narrator, a
+mere satellite of Matthew with no independent light. His terse and graphic
+style makes on Strauss an impression of artificiality. He refuses to
+believe this Evangelist when he says that on the first day at Capernaum
+"the whole town" (Mark i. 33) came together before Peter's door, and that,
+on other occasions (Mark iii. 20, vi. 31), the press was so great that
+Jesus and His disciples had no leisure so much as to eat. "All very
+improbable traits," he remarks, "the absence of which in Matthew is
+entirely to his advantage, for what else are they than legendary
+exaggerations?" In this criticism he is at one with Schleiermacher, who in
+his essay on Luke(37) speaks of the unreal vividness of Mark "which often
+gives his Gospel an almost apocryphal aspect."
+
+This prejudice against Mark has a twofold cause. In the first place, this
+Gospel with its graphic details had rendered great service to the
+rationalistic explanation of miracle. Its description of the cure of the
+blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 22-26)--whose eyes Jesus first anointed
+with spittle, whereupon he at first saw things dimly, and then, after he
+had felt the touch of the Lord's hand upon his eyes a second time, saw
+more clearly--was a veritable treasure-trove for rationalism. As Strauss is
+disposed to deal much more peremptorily with the rationalists than with
+the supernaturalists, he puts Mark upon his trial, as their accessory
+before the fact, and pronounces upon him a judgment which is not entirely
+unprejudiced. Moreover, it is not until the Gospels are looked at from the
+point of view of the plan of the history and the inner connexion of events
+that the superiority of Mark is clearly realised. But this way of looking
+at the matter does not enter into Strauss's purview. On the contrary, he
+denies that there is any traceable connexion of events at all, and
+confines his attention to determining the proportion of myth in the
+content of each separate narrative.
+
+Of the Synoptic question he does not, strictly speaking, take any account.
+That was partly due to the fact that when he wrote it was in a thoroughly
+unsatisfactory position. There was a confused welter of the most various
+hypotheses. The priority of Mark, which had had earlier champions in
+Koppe,(38) Storr,(39) Gratz,(40) and Herder,(41) was now maintained by
+Credner and Lachmann, who saw in Matthew a combination of the logia-
+document with Mark. The "primitive Gospel" hypothesis of Eichhorn,
+according to which the first three Gospels went back to a common source,
+not identical with any of them, had become somewhat discredited. There had
+been much discussion and various modifications of Griesbach's "dependence
+theory," according to which Mark was pieced together out of Matthew and
+Luke, and Schleiermacher's _Diegesentheorie_,(42) which saw the primary
+material not in a gospel, but in unconnected notes; from these,
+collections of narrative passages were afterwards formed, which in the
+post-apostolic period coalesced into continuous descriptions of the life
+of Jesus such as the three which have been preserved in our Synoptic
+Gospels.
+
+In this matter Strauss is a sceptical eclectic. In the main he may be said
+to combine Griesbach's theory of the secondary origin of Mark with
+Schleiermacher's _Diegesentheorie_, the latter answering to his method of
+treating the sections separately. But whereas Schleiermacher had used the
+plan of John's Gospel as a framework into which to fit the independent
+narratives, Strauss's rejection of the Fourth Gospel left him without any
+means of connecting the sections. He makes a point, indeed, of sharply
+emphasising this want of connexion; and it was just this that made his
+work appear so extreme.
+
+The Synoptic discourses, like the Johannine, are composite structures,
+created by later tradition out of sayings which originally belonged to
+different times and circumstances, arranged under certain leading ideas so
+as to form connected discourses. The sermon on the mount, the discourse at
+the sending forth of the twelve, the great parable-discourse, the polemic
+against the Pharisees, have all been gradually formed like geological
+deposits. So far as the original juxtaposition may be supposed to have
+been here and there preserved, Matthew is doubtless the most trustworthy
+authority for it. "From the comparison which we have been making," says
+Strauss in one passage, "we can already see that the hard grit of these
+sayings of Jesus (_die koernigen Reden Jesu_) has not indeed been dissolved
+by the flood of oral tradition, but they have often been washed away from
+their original position and like rolling pebbles (_Geroelle_) have been
+deposited in places to which they do not properly belong."(43) And,
+moreover, we find this distinction between the first three Evangelists,
+viz. that Matthew is a skilful collector who, while he is far from having
+been able always to give the original connexion, has at least known how to
+bring related passages aptly together, whereas in the other two many
+fragmentary sayings have been left exactly where chance had deposited
+them, which was generally in the interstices between the larger masses of
+discourse. Luke, indeed, has in some cases made an effort to give them an
+artistic setting, which is, however, by no means a satisfactory substitute
+for the natural connexion.
+
+It is in his criticism of the parables that Strauss is most extreme. He
+starts out from the assumption that they have mutually influenced one
+another, and that those which may possibly be genuine have only been
+preserved in a secondary form. In the parable of the marriage supper of
+the king's son, for example, he confidently assumes that the conduct of
+the invited guests, who finally ill-treated and slew the messengers, and
+the question why the guest is not wearing a wedding-garment are secondary
+features.
+
+How external he supposes the connexion of the narratives to be is clear
+from the way in which he explains the juxtaposition of the story of the
+transfiguration with the "discourse while descending the mountain." They
+have, he says, really nothing to do with one another. The disciples on one
+occasion asked Jesus about the coming of Elijah as forerunner; Elijah also
+appears in the story of the transfiguration: accordingly tradition simply
+grouped the transfiguration and the discourse together under the heading
+"Elijah," and, later on, manufactured a connexion between them.
+
+The tendency of the work to purely critical analysis, the ostentatious
+avoidance of any positive expression of opinion, and not least, the manner
+of regarding the Synoptists as mere bundles of narratives and discourses,
+make it difficult--indeed, strictly speaking, impossible--to determine
+Strauss's own distinctive conception of the life of Jesus, to discover
+what he really thinks is moving behind the curtain of myth. According to
+the view taken in regard to this point his work becomes either a negative
+or a positive life of Jesus. There are, for instance, a number of
+incidental remarks which contain the suggestion of a positive construction
+of the life of Jesus. If they were taken out of their context and brought
+together they would yield a picture which would have points of contact
+with the latest eschatological view. Strauss, however, deliberately
+restricts his positive suggestions to these few detached remarks. He
+follows out no line to its conclusion. Each separate problem is indeed
+considered, and light is thrown upon it from various quarters with much
+critical skill. But he will not venture on a solution of any of them.
+Sometimes, when he thinks he has gone too far in the way of positive
+suggestion, he deliberately wipes it all out again with some expression of
+scepticism.
+
+As to the duration of the ministry he will not even offer a vague
+conjecture. As to the connexion of certain events, nothing can, according
+to him, be known, since the Johannine outline cannot be accepted and the
+Synoptists arrange everything with an eye to analogies and association of
+ideas, though they flattered themselves that they were giving a
+chronologically arranged narrative. From the contents of the narratives,
+however, and from the monotonous recurrence of certain formulae of
+connexion, it is evident that no clear view of an organically connected
+whole can be assumed to be present in their work. We have no fixed points
+to enable us to reconstruct even in a measure the chronological order.
+
+Especially interesting is his discussion of the title "Son of Man." In the
+saying "the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath day" (Matt. xii. 8),
+the expression might, according to Strauss, simply denote "man." In other
+passages one gets the impression that Jesus spoke of the Son of Man as a
+supernatural person, quite distinct from Himself, but identified with the
+Messiah. This is the most natural explanation of the passage in Matt. x.
+23, where he promises the disciples, in sending them forth, that they
+shall not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man shall
+come. Here Jesus speaks of the Messiah as if He Himself were his
+forerunner. These sayings would, therefore, fall in the first period,
+before He knew Himself to be the Messiah. Strauss does not suspect the
+significance of this incidental remark; it contains the germ of the
+solution of the problem of the Son of Man on the lines of Johannes Weiss.
+But immediately scepticism triumphs again. How can we tell, asks Strauss,
+where the title Son of Man is genuine in the sayings of Jesus, and where
+it has been inserted without special significance, merely from habit?
+
+Not less insoluble, in his opinion, is the question regarding the point of
+time at which Jesus claimed the Messianic dignity for Himself. "Whereas in
+John," Strauss remarks, "Jesus remains constant in His avowal, his
+disciples and followers constant in their conviction, that He is the
+Messiah; in the Synoptics, on the other hand, there are, so to speak,
+relapses to be observed; so that, in the case of the disciples and the
+people generally, the conviction of Jesus' Messiahship expressed on
+earlier occasions, sometimes, in the course of the narrative, disappears
+again and gives place to a much lower view of Him; and even Jesus Himself,
+in comparison with His earlier unambiguous declaration, is more reserved
+on later occasions." The account of the confession of the Messiahship at
+Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus pronounces Peter blessed because of his
+confession, and at the same time forbids the Twelve to speak of it, is
+unintelligible, since according to this same Gospel His Messiahship had
+been mooted by the disciples on several previous occasions, and had been
+acknowledged by the demoniacs. The Synoptists, therefore, contradict
+themselves. Then there are the further cases in which Jesus forbids the
+making known of His Messiahship, without any reason whatever. It would, no
+doubt, be historically possible to assume that it only gradually dawned
+upon Him that He was the Messiah--in any case not until after His baptism
+by John, as otherwise He would have to be supposed to have made a pretence
+upon that occasion--and that as often as the thought that He might be the
+Messiah was aroused in others by something that occurred, and was
+suggested to Him from without, He was immediately alarmed at hearing
+spoken, aloud and definitely, that which He Himself had scarcely dared to
+cherish as a possibility, or in regard to which He had only lately
+attained to a clear conviction.
+
+From these suggestions one thing is evident, namely, that for Strauss the
+Messianic consciousness of Jesus was an historical fact, and is not to be
+referred, as has sometimes been supposed, to myth. To assert that Strauss
+dissolved the life of Jesus into myth is, in fact, an absurdity which,
+however often it may be repeated by people who have not read his book, or
+have read it only superficially, does not become any the less absurd by
+repetition.
+
+To come to detail, Jesus thought of His Messiahship, according to Strauss,
+in the form that He, although of human parentage, should after His earthly
+life be taken up into heaven, and thence should come again to bring in His
+Kingdom. "As, moreover, in the higher Jewish theology, immediately after
+the time of Jesus, the idea of the pre-existence of the Messiah was
+present, the conjecture naturally suggests itself that it was also present
+at the time when Jesus' thoughts were being formed, and that consequently,
+if He once began to think of Himself as the Messiah, He might also have
+referred to Himself this feature of the Messianic conception. Whether
+Jesus had been initiated, as Paul was, into the wisdom of the schools in
+such a way that He could draw this conception from it, is no doubt open to
+question."
+
+In his treatment of the eschatology Strauss makes a valiant effort to
+escape from the dilemma "_either_ spiritual _or_ political" in regard to
+the Messianic plans of Jesus, and to make the eschatological expectation
+intelligible as one which did not set its hopes upon human aid, but on
+Divine intervention. This is one of the most important contributions to a
+real understanding of the eschatological problem. Sometimes one almost
+seems to be reading Johannes Weiss; as, for example, when Strauss explains
+that Jesus could promise His followers that they should sit on thrones
+without thinking of a political revolution, because He expected a reversal
+of present conditions to be brought about by God, and referred this
+judicial authority and kingly rule to the time of the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}.
+"Jesus, therefore, certainly expected to restore the throne of David, and,
+with His disciples, to rule over a people freed from political bondage,
+but in this expectation He did not set His hopes on the sword of human
+followers (Luke xxii. 38, Matt. xxvi. 52), but upon the legions of angels
+which His heavenly Father could give Him (Matt. xxvi. 53). When He speaks
+of the coming of His Messianic glory, it is with angels and heavenly
+powers that He surrounds Himself (Matt. xvi. 27, xxiv. 30 ff., xxv. 31).
+Before the majesty of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven the
+nations will submit without striking a blow, and at the sound of the
+angel's trumpet-blast will, with the dead who shall then arise, range
+themselves before Him and His disciples for judgment. All this Jesus did
+not purpose to bring about by any arbitrary action of His own, but left it
+to His heavenly Father, who alone knew the right moment for this
+catastrophic change (Mark xiii. 32), to give Him the signal of its coming;
+and He did not waver in His faith even when death came upon Him before its
+realisation. Any one who shrinks from adopting this view of the Messianic
+background of Jesus' plans, because he fears by so doing to make Jesus a
+visionary enthusiast, must remember how exactly these hopes corresponded
+to the long-cherished Messianic expectation of the Jews; and how easily,
+on the supernaturalistic assumptions of the period and among a people
+which preserved so strict an isolation as the Jews, an ideal which was in
+itself fantastic, if it were the national ideal and had some true and good
+features, could take possession of the mind even of one who was not
+inclined to fanaticism."
+
+One of the principal proofs that the preaching of Jesus was
+eschatologically conditioned is the Last Supper. "When," says Strauss, "He
+concluded the celebration with the saying, 'I will not drink henceforth of
+the fruit of the vine until I drink it new with you in my Father's
+kingdom,' He would seem to have expected that in the Messianic kingdom the
+Passover would be celebrated with peculiar solemnity. Therefore, in
+assuring them that they shall next partake of the Feast, not in the
+present age, but in the new era, He evidently expects that within a year's
+time the pre-Messianic dispensation will have come to an end and the
+Messianic age will have begun." But it must be admitted, Strauss
+immediately adds, that the definite assurance which the Evangelists put
+into His mouth may after all only have been in reality an expression of
+pious hope. In a similar way he qualifies his other statements regarding
+the eschatological ideas of Jesus by recalling that we cannot determine
+the part which the expectations of primitive Christianity may have had in
+moulding these sayings.
+
+Thus, for example, the opinions which he expresses on the great Parousia
+discourse in Matt. xxiv. are extremely cautious. The detailed prophecies
+regarding the Second Coming which the Synoptists put into the mouth of
+Jesus cannot be derived from Jesus Himself. The question suggests itself,
+however, whether He did not cherish the hope, and make the promise, that
+He would one day appear in glory as the Messiah? "If in any period of His
+life He held Himself to be the Messiah--and that there was a period when He
+did so there can be no doubt--and if He described Himself as the Son of
+Man, He must have expected the coming in the clouds which Daniel had
+ascribed to the Son of Man; but it may be questioned whether He thought of
+this as an exaltation which should take place even in His lifetime, or as
+something which was only to take place after His death. Utterances like
+Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28 rather suggest the former, but the possibility
+remains that later, when he had begun to feel that His death was certain,
+his conception took the latter form, and that Matt. xxvi. 64 was spoken
+with this in view." Thus, even for Strauss, the problem of the Son of Man
+is already the central problem in which are focused all the questions
+regarding the Messiahship and eschatology.
+
+From all this it may be seen how strongly he had been influenced by
+Reimarus, whom, indeed, he frequently mentions. It would be still more
+evident if he had not obscured his historical views by constantly bringing
+the mythological explanation into play.
+
+The thought of the supernatural realisation of the Kingdom of God must
+also, according to Strauss, be the starting-point of any attempt to
+understand Jesus' attitude towards the Law and the Gentiles, so far as
+that is possible in view of the conflicting data. The conservative
+passages must carry most weight. They need not necessarily fall at the
+beginning of His ministry, because it is questionable whether the
+hypothesis of a later period of increasing liberality in regard to the law
+and the Gentiles can be made probable. There would be more chance of
+proving that the conservative sayings are the only authentic ones, for
+unless all the indications are misleading the _terminus a quo_ for this
+change of attitude is the death of Jesus. He no doubt looked forward to
+the abolition of the Law and the removal of the barriers between Jew and
+Gentile, but only in the future Kingdom. "If that be so," remarks Strauss,
+"the difference between the views of Jesus and of Paul consisted only in
+this, that while Jesus expected these limitations to fall away when, at
+His second coming, the earth should be renewed, Paul believed himself
+justified in doing away with them in consequence of the first coming of
+the Messiah, upon the still unregenerated earth."
+
+The eschatological passages are therefore the most authentic of all. If
+there is anything historic about Jesus, it is His assertion of the claim
+that in the coming kingdom He would be manifested as the Son of Man.
+
+On the other hand, in the predictions of the passion and resurrection we
+are on quite uncertain ground. The detailed statements regarding the
+manner of the catastrophe place it beyond doubt that we have here
+_vaticinia ex eventu_. Otherwise the despair of the disciples when the
+events occurred could not be explained. Yet it is possible that Jesus had
+a prevision of His death. Perhaps the resolve to die was essential to His
+conception of the Messiahship and He was not forced thereto by
+circumstances. This we might be able to determine with certainty if we had
+more exact information regarding the conception of the suffering Messiah
+in contemporary Jewish theology; which is, however, not available. We do
+not even know whether the conception had ever existed in Judaism. "In the
+New Testament it almost looks as if no one among the Jews had ever thought
+of a suffering or dying Messiah." The conception can, however, certainly
+be found in later passages of Rabbinic literature.
+
+The question is therefore insoluble. We must be content to work with
+possibilities. The result of a full discussion of the resolve to suffer
+and the significance attached to the suffering is summed up by Strauss in
+the following sentences. "In view of these considerations it is possible
+that Jesus might, by a natural process of thought, have come to see how
+greatly such a catastrophe would contribute to the spiritual development
+of His disciples, and in accordance with national conceptions, interpreted
+in the light of some Old Testament passages, might have arrived at the
+idea of an atoning power in His Messianic death. At the same time the
+explicit utterance which the Synoptists attribute to Jesus describing His
+death as an atoning sacrifice, might well belong rather to the system of
+thought which grew up after the death of Jesus, and the saying which the
+Fourth Gospel puts into His mouth regarding the relation of His death to
+the coming of the Paraclete might seem to be prophecy after the event. So
+that even in these sayings of Jesus regarding the purpose of His death, it
+is necessary to distinguish between the particular and the general."
+
+Strauss's "Life of Jesus" has a different significance for modern theology
+from that which it had for his contemporaries. For them it was the work
+which made an end of miracle as a matter of historical belief, and gave
+the mythological explanation its due.
+
+We, however, find in it also an historical aspect of a positive character,
+inasmuch as the historic Personality which emerges from the mist of myth
+is a Jewish claimant of the Messiahship, whose world of thought is purely
+eschatological. Strauss is, therefore, no mere destroyer of untenable
+solutions, but also the prophet of a coming advance in knowledge.
+
+It was, however, his own fault that his merit in this respect was not
+recognised in the nineteenth century, because in his "Life of Jesus for
+the German People" (1864), where he undertook to draw a positive historic
+picture of Jesus, he renounced his better opinions of 1835, eliminated
+eschatology, and, instead of the historic Jesus, portrayed the Jesus of
+liberal theology.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX. STRAUSS'S OPPONENTS AND SUPPORTERS
+
+
+    _David Friedrich Strauss._ Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner
+    Schrift ueber das Leben-Jesu und zur Charakteristik der
+    gegenwaertigen Theologie. (Replies to criticisms of my work on the
+    Life of Jesus; with an estimate of present-day theology.)
+    Tuebingen, 1837.
+
+    Das Leben-Jesu, 3te verbesserte Auflage (3rd revised edition).
+    1838-1839, Tuebingen.
+
+    _August Tholuck._ Die Glaubwuerdigkeit der evangelischen
+    Geschichte, zugleich eine Kritik des Lebens Jesu von Strauss. (The
+    Credibility of the Gospel History, with an incidental criticism of
+    Strauss's "Leben-Jesu.") Hamburg, 1837.
+
+    _Aug. Wilh. Neander._ Das Leben Jesu-Christi. Hamburg, 1837.
+
+    Dr. Neanders auf hoehere Veranlassung abgefasstes Gutachten ueber
+    das Buch des Dr. Strauss' "Leben-Jesu" und das in Beziehung auf
+    die Verbreitung desselben zu beachtende Verfahren. (Dr. Neander's
+    report, drawn up at the request of the authorities, upon Dr.
+    Strauss's "Leben-Jesu" and the measures to be adopted in regard to
+    its circulation.) 1836.
+
+    _Leonhard Hug._ Gutachten ueber das Leben-Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet
+    von D. Fr. Strauss. (Report on D. Fr. Strauss's critical work upon
+    the Life of Jesus.) Freiburg, 1840.
+
+    _Christian Gottlob Wilke._ Tradition und Mythe. Ein Beitrag zur
+    historischen Kritik der kanonischen Evangelien ueberhaupt, wie
+    insbesondere zur Wuerdigung des mythischen Idealismus im Leben-Jesu
+    von Strauss. (Tradition and Myth. A Contribution to the General
+    Historical Criticism of the Gospels; with special reference to the
+    mythical idealism of Strauss's "Leben-Jesu.") Leipzig, 1837.
+
+    _August Ebrard._ Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen
+    Geschichte. (Scientific Criticism of the Gospel History.)
+    Frankfort, 1842.
+
+    _Georg Heinr. Aug. Ewald._ Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit.
+    (History of Christ and His Times.) 1855. Fifth volume of the
+    "Geschichte des Volkes Israel."
+
+    _Christoph Friedrich von Ammon._ Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu
+    mit steter Ruecksicht auf die vorhandenen Quellen. (History of the
+    Life of Jesus with constant reference to the extant sources.) 3
+    vols. 1842-1847.
+
+
+Scarcely ever has a book let loose such a storm of controversy; and
+scarcely ever has a controversy been so barren of immediate result. The
+fertilising rain brought up a crop of toad-stools. Of the forty or fifty
+essays on the subject which appeared in the next five years, there are
+only four or five which are of any value, and even of these the value is
+very small.
+
+Strauss's first idea was to deal with each of his opponents separately,
+and he published in 1837 three successive _Streitschriften_.(44) In the
+preface to the first of these he states that he has kept silence for two
+years from a rooted objection to anything in the nature of reply or
+counter-criticism, and because he had little expectation of any good
+results from such controversy. These essays are able, and are often
+written with biting scorn, especially that directed against his inveterate
+enemy, Steudel of Tuebingen, the representative of intellectual
+supernaturalism, and that against Eschenmayer, a pastor, also of Tuebingen.
+To a work of the latter, "The Iscariotism of our Days" (1835), he had
+referred in the preface to the second volume of his Life of Jesus in the
+following remark: "This offspring of the legitimate marriage between
+theological ignorance and religious intolerance, blessed by a sleep-
+walking philosophy, succeeds in making itself so completely ridiculous
+that it renders any serious reply unnecessary."
+
+But for all his sarcasm Strauss does not show himself an adroit debater in
+this controversy, any more than in later times in the Diet.
+
+It is indeed remarkable how unskilled in polemics is this man who had
+produced a critical work of the first importance with almost playful ease.
+If his opponents made no effort to understand him rightly--and many of them
+certainly wrote without having carefully studied the fourteen hundred
+pages of his two volumes--Strauss on his part seemed to be stricken with a
+kind of uncertainty, lost himself in a maze of detail, and failed to keep
+continually re-formulating the main problems which he had set up for
+discussion, and so compelling his adversaries to face them fairly.
+
+Of these problems there were three. The first was composed of the related
+questions regarding miracle and myth; the second concerned the connexion
+of the Christ of faith with the Jesus of history; the third referred to
+the relation of the Gospel of John to the Synoptists.
+
+It was the first that attracted most attention; more than half the critics
+devoted themselves to it alone. Even so they failed to get a thorough
+grasp of it. The only thing that they clearly see is that Strauss
+altogether denies the miracles; the full scope of the mythological
+explanation as applied to the traditional records of the life of Jesus,
+and the extent of the historical material which Strauss is prepared to
+accept, is still a riddle to them. That is in some measure due, it must in
+fairness be said, to the arrangement of Strauss's own work, in which the
+unconnected series of separate investigations makes the subject
+unnecessarily difficult even for one who wishes to do the author justice.
+
+The attitude towards miracle assumed in the anti-Strauss literature shows
+how far the anti-rationalistic reaction had carried professedly scientific
+theology in the direction of supernaturalism. Some significant symptoms
+had begun to show themselves even in Hase and Schleiermacher of a tendency
+towards the overcoming of rationalism by a kind of intellectual gymnastic
+which ran some risk of falling into insincerity. The essential character
+of this new kind of historical theology first came to light when Strauss
+put it to the question, and forced it to substitute a plain yes or no for
+the ambiguous phrases with which this school had only too quickly
+accustomed itself to evade the difficulties of the problem of miracle. The
+mottoes with which this new school of theology adorned the works which it
+sent forth against the untimely troubler of their peace manifest its
+complete perplexity, and display the coquettish resignation with which the
+sacred learning of the time essayed to cover its nakedness, after it had
+succumbed to the temptation of the serpent insincerity. Adolf Harless of
+Erlangen chose the melancholy saying of Pascal: "Tout tourne bien pour les
+elus, jusqu'aux obscurites de l'ecriture, car ils les honorent a cause des
+clartes divines qu'ils y voient; et tout tourne en mal aux reprouves,
+jusqu'aux clartes, car ils les blasphement a cause des obscurites qu'ils
+n'entendent pas."(45)
+
+Herr Wilhelm Hoffmann,(46) deacon at Winnenden, selected Bacon's aphorism:
+"Animus ad amplitudinem mysteriorum pro modulo suo dilatetur, non mysteria
+ad angustias animi constringantur." (Let the mind, so far as possible, be
+expanded to the greatness of the mysteries, not the mysteries contracted
+to the compass of the mind.)
+
+Professor Ernst Osiander,(47) of the seminary at Maulbronn, appeals to
+Cicero: "O magna vis veritatis, quae contra hominum ingenia, calliditatem,
+sollertiam facillime se per ipsam defendit." (O mighty power of truth,
+which against all the ingenious devices, the craft and subtlety, of men,
+easily defends itself by its own strength!)
+
+Franz Baader, of Munich,(48) ornaments his work with the reflection: "Il
+faut que les hommes soient bien loin de toi, o Verite! puisque tu supporte
+(_sic!_) leur ignorance, leurs erreurs, et leurs crimes." (Men must indeed
+be far from thee, O Truth, since thou art able to bear with their
+ignorance, their errors, and their crimes!)
+
+Tholuck(49) girds himself with the Catholic maxim of Vincent of Lerins:
+"Teneamus quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est." (Let us
+hold that which has been believed always, everywhere, by all.)
+
+The fear of Strauss had, indeed, a tendency to inspire Protestant
+theologians with catholicising ideas. One of the most competent reviewers
+of his book, Dr. Ullmann in the _Studien und Kritiken_, had expressed the
+wish that it had been written in Latin to prevent its doing harm among the
+people.(50) An anonymous dialogue of the period shows us the schoolmaster
+coming in distress to the clergyman. He has allowed himself to be
+persuaded into reading the book by his acquaintance the Major, and he is
+now anxious to get rid of the doubts which it has aroused in him. When his
+cure has been safely accomplished, the reverend gentleman dismisses him
+with the following exhortation: "Now I hope that after the experience
+which you have had you will for the future refrain from reading books of
+this kind, which are not written for you, and of which there is no
+necessity for you to take any notice; and for the refutation of which,
+should that be needful, you have no equipment. You may be quite sure that
+anything useful or profitable for you which such books may contain will
+reach you in due course through the proper channel and in the right way,
+and, that being so, you are under no necessity to jeopardise any part of
+your peace of mind."
+
+Tholuck's work professedly aims only at presenting a "historical argument
+for the credibility of the miracle stories of the Gospels." "Even if we
+admit," he says in one place, "the scientific position that no act can
+have proceeded from Christ which transcends the laws of nature, there is
+still room for the mediating view of Christ's miracle-working activity.
+This leads us to think of mysterious powers of nature as operating in the
+history of Christ--powers such as we have some partial knowledge of, as,
+for example, those magnetic powers which have survived down to our own
+time, like ghosts lingering on after the coming of day." From the
+standpoint of this spurious rationalism he proceeds to take Strauss to
+task for rejecting the miracles. "Had this latest critic been able to
+approach the Gospel miracles without prejudice, in the Spirit of
+Augustine's declaration, 'dandum est deo, eum aliquid facere posse quod
+nos investigare non possumus,' he would certainly--since he is a man who in
+addition to the acumen of the scholar possesses sound common sense--have
+come to a different conclusion in regard to these difficulties. As it is,
+however, he has approached the Gospels with the conviction that miracles
+are impossible; and on that assumption, it was certain before the argument
+began that the Evangelists were either deceivers or deceived."
+
+Neander, in his Life of Jesus,(51) handles the question with more delicacy
+of touch, rather in the style of Schleiermacher. "Christ's miracles," he
+explains, "are to be understood as an influencing of nature, human or
+material." He does not, however, give so much prominence as Schleiermacher
+had done to the difficulty involved in the supposition of an influence
+exercised upon material nature. He repeats Schleiermacher's assertions,
+but without the imposing dialectic which in Schleiermacher's hands almost
+commands assent. In regard to the miracle at Cana he remarks: "We cannot
+indeed form any clear conception of an effect brought about by the
+introduction of a higher creative principle into the natural order, since
+we have no experience on which to base such a conception, but we are by no
+means compelled to take this extreme view as to what happened; we may
+quite well suppose that Christ by an immediate influence upon the water
+communicated to it a higher potency which enabled it to produce the
+effects of strong wine." In the case of all the miracles he makes a point
+of seeking not only the explanation, but the higher symbolical
+significance. The miracle of the fig-tree--which is _sui generis_--has only
+this symbolical significance, seeing that it is not beneficent and
+creative but destructive. "It can only be thought of as a vivid
+illustration of a prediction of the Divine judgment, after the manner of
+the symbolic actions of the Old Testament prophets."
+
+With reference to the ascension and the resurrection he writes: "Even
+though we can form no clear idea of the exact way in which the exaltation
+of Christ from the earth took place--and indeed there is much that is
+obscure in regard to the earthly life of Christ after His
+resurrection--yet, in its place in the organic unity of the Christian
+faith, it is as certain as the resurrection, which apart from it cannot be
+recognised in its true significance."
+
+That extract is typical of Neander's Life of Jesus, which in its time was
+hailed as a great achievement, calculated to provide a learned refutation
+of Strauss's criticism, and of which a seventh edition appeared as late as
+1872. The real piety of heart with which it is imbued cannot conceal the
+fact that it is a patchwork of unsatisfactory compromises. It is the child
+of despair, and has perplexity for godfather. One cannot read it without
+pain.
+
+Neander, however, may fairly claim to be judged, not by this work, but by
+his personal attitude in the Strauss controversy. And here he appears as a
+magnanimous and dignified representative of theological science.
+Immediately after the appearance of Strauss's book, which, it was at once
+seen, would cause much offence, the Prussian Government asked Neander to
+report upon it, with a view to prohibiting the circulation, should there
+appear to be grounds for doing so. He presented his report on the 15th of
+November 1835, and, an inaccurate account of it having appeared in the
+_Allgemeine Zeitung_, subsequently published it.(52) In it he censures the
+work as being written from a too purely rationalistic point of view, but
+strongly urges the Government not to suppress it by an edict. He describes
+it as "a book which, it must be admitted, constitutes a danger to the
+sacred interests of the Church, but which follows the method of
+endeavouring to produce a reasoned conviction by means of argument. Hence
+any other method of dealing with it than by meeting argument with argument
+will appear in the unfavourable light of an arbitrary interference with
+the freedom of science."
+
+In holding that scientific theology will be able by its own strength to
+overthrow whatever in Strauss's Life of Jesus deserves to be overthrown,
+Neander is at one with the anonymous writer of "Aphorisms in Defence of
+Dr. Strauss and his Work,"(53) who consoles himself with Goethe's saying--
+
+
+    Das Tuechtige, auch wenn es falsch ist,
+    Wirkt Tag fuer Tag, von Haus zu Haus;
+    Das Tuechtige, wenn's wahrhaftig ist,
+    Wirkt ueber alle Zeiten hinaus.(54)
+
+    (Strive hard, and though your aim be wrong,
+    Your work shall live its little day;
+    Strive hard, and for the truth be strong,
+    Your work shall live and grow for aye.)
+
+
+"Dr. Strauss," says this anonymous writer, "does not represent the
+author's views, and he on his part cannot undertake to defend Dr.
+Strauss's conclusions. But it is clear to him that Dr. Strauss's work
+considered as a scientific production is more scientific than the works
+opposed to it from the side of religion are religious. Otherwise why are
+they so passionate, so apprehensive, so unjust?"
+
+This confidence in pure critical science was not shared by Herr Privat-
+Docent Daniel Schenkel of Basle, afterwards Professor at Heidelberg. In a
+dreary work dedicated to his Goettingen teacher Luecke, on "Historical
+Science and the Church,"(55) he looks for future salvation towards that
+middle region where faith and science interpenetrate, and hails the new
+supernaturalism which approximates to a scientific treatment of these
+subjects "as a hopeful phenomenon." He rejoices in the violent opposition
+at Zurich which led to the cancelling of Strauss's appointment, regarding
+it as likely to exercise an elevating influence. A similarly lofty
+position is taken up by the anonymous author of "Dr. Strauss and the
+Zurich Church,"(56) to which De Wette contributed a preface. Though
+professing great esteem for Strauss, and admitting that from the purely
+historical point of view he is in the right, the author feels bound to
+congratulate the Zurichers on having refused to admit him to the office of
+teacher.
+
+The pure rationalists found it much more difficult than did the mediating
+theologians, whether of the older or younger school, to adjust their
+attitude to the new solution of the miracle question. Strauss himself had
+made it difficult for them by remorselessly exposing the absurd and
+ridiculous aspects of their method, and by refusing to recognise them as
+allies in the battle for truth, as they really were. Paulus would have
+been justified in bearing him a grudge. But the inner greatness of that
+man of hard exterior comes out in the fact that he put his personal
+feelings in the background, and when Strauss became the central figure in
+the battle for the purity and freedom of historical science he ignored his
+attacks on rationalism and came to his defence. In a very remarkable
+letter to the Free Canton of Zurich, on "Freedom in Theological Teaching
+and in the Choice of Teachers for Colleges,"(57) he urges the council and
+the people to appoint Strauss because of the principle at stake, and in
+order to avoid giving any encouragement to the retrograde movement in
+historical science. It is as though he felt that the end of rationalism
+had come, but that, in the person of the enemy who had defeated it, the
+pure love of truth, which was the only thing that really mattered, would
+triumph over all the forces of reaction.
+
+It would not, however, be true to say that Strauss had beaten rationalism
+from the field. In Ammon's famous Life of Jesus,(58) in which the author
+takes up a very respectful attitude towards Strauss, there is a vigorous
+survival of a peculiar kind of rationalism inspired by Kant. For Ammon, a
+miraculous event can only exist when its natural causes have been
+discovered. "The sacred history is subject to the same laws as all other
+narratives of antiquity." Luecke, in dealing with the raising of Lazarus,
+had thrown out the question whether Biblical miracles could be thought of
+historically at all, and in so doing supposed that he was putting their
+absolute character on a firmer basis. "We," says Ammon, "give the opposite
+answer from that which is expected; only historically conceivable miracles
+can be admitted." He cannot away with the constant confusion of faith and
+knowledge found in so many writers "who swim in an ocean of ideas in which
+the real and the illusory are as inseparable as salt and sea-water in the
+actual ocean." In every natural process, he explains, we have to suppose,
+according to Kant, an interpenetration of natural and supernatural. For
+that very reason the purely supernatural does not exist for our
+experience. "It is no doubt certain," so he lays it down on the lines of
+Kant's _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, "that every act of causation which
+goes forth from God must be immediate, universal, and eternal, because it
+is thought as an effect of His will, which is exalted above space and time
+and interpenetrates both of them, but without abolishing them, leaving
+them undisturbed in their continuity and succession. For us men,
+therefore, all action of God is mediate, because we are completely
+surrounded by time and space, as the fish is by the sea or the bird by the
+air, and apart from these relations we should be incapable of
+apperception, and therefore of any real experience. As free beings we can,
+indeed, think of miracle as immediately Divine, but we cannot perceive it
+as such, because that would be impossible without seeing God, which for
+wise reasons is forbidden to us." "In accordance with these principles, we
+shall hold it to be our duty in what follows to call attention to the
+natural side even of the miracles of Jesus, since apart from this no fact
+can become an object of belief."
+
+It is only in this intelligible sense that the cures of Jesus are to be
+thought of as "miracles." The magnetic force, with which the mediating
+theology makes play, is to be rejected. "The cure of psychical diseases by
+the power of the word and of faith is the only kind of cure in which the
+student of natural science can find any basis for a conjecture regarding
+the way in which the cures of Jesus were effected."
+
+In the case of the other miracles Ammon assumes a kind of Occasionalism,
+in the sense that it may have pleased the Divine Providence "to fulfil in
+fact the confidently spoken promises of Jesus, and in that way to confirm
+His personal authority, which was necessary to the establishment of His
+doctrine of the Divine salvation."
+
+In most cases, however, he is content to repeat the rationalistic
+explanation, and portrays a Jesus who makes use of medicines, allows the
+demoniac himself to rush upon the herd of swine, helps a leper, whom he
+sees to be suffering only from one of the milder forms of the disease, to
+secure the public recognition of his being legally clean, and who exerts
+himself to prevent by word and act the premature burial of persons in a
+state of trance. The story of the feeding of the multitude is based on
+some occasion when there was "a bountiful display of hospitality, a
+generous sharing of provisions, inspired by Jesus' prayer of thanksgiving
+and the example which He set when the disciples were inclined selfishly to
+hold back their own supply." The story of the miracle at Cana rests on a
+mere misunderstanding, those who report it not having known that the wine
+which Jesus caused to be secretly brought forth was the wedding-gift which
+he was presenting in the name of the family. As a disciple of Kant,
+however, Ammon feels obliged to refute the imputation that Jesus could
+have done anything to promote excess, and calculates that the present of
+wine which Jesus had intended to give the bridal pair may be estimated as
+equivalent to not more than eighteen bottles.(59) He explains the walking
+on the sea by claiming for Jesus an acquaintance with "the art of treading
+water."
+
+Only in regard to the explanation of the resurrection does Ammon break
+away from rationalism. He decides that the reality of the death of Jesus
+is historically proved. But he does not venture to suppose a real
+reawakening to life, and remains at the standpoint of Herder.
+
+But the way in which, in spite of the deeper view of the conception of
+miracle which he owes to Kant, he constantly falls back upon the most
+pedestrian naturalistic explanations, and his failure to rid himself of
+the prejudice that an actual, even if not a miraculous fact must underlie
+all the recorded miracles, is in itself sufficient to prove that we have
+here to do with a mere revival of rationalism: that is, with an untenable
+theory which Strauss's refutation of Paulus had already relegated to the
+past.
+
+It was an easier task for pure supernaturalism than for pure rationalism
+to come to terms with Strauss. For the former Strauss was only the enemy
+of the mediating theology--there was nothing to fear from him and much to
+gain. Accordingly Hengstenberg's _Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_ hailed
+Strauss's book as "one of the most gratifying phenomena in the domain of
+recent theological literature," and praises the author for having carried
+out with logical consistency the application of the mythical theory which
+had formerly been restricted to the Old Testament and certain parts only
+of the Gospel tradition. "All that Strauss has done is to bring the spirit
+of the age to a clear consciousness of itself and of the necessary
+consequences which flow from its essential character. He has taught it how
+to get rid of foreign elements which were still present in it, and which
+marked an imperfect stage of its development."
+
+He has been the most influential factor in the necessary process of
+separation. There is no one with whom Hengstenberg feels himself more in
+agreement than with the Tuebingen scholar. Had he not shown with the
+greatest precision how the results of the Hegelian philosophy, one may
+say, of philosophy in general, reacted upon Christian faith? "The relation
+of speculation to faith has now come clearly to light."
+
+"Two nations," writes Hengstenberg in 1836, "are struggling in the womb of
+our time, and two only. They will be ever more definitely opposed to one
+another. Unbelief will more and more cast off the elements of faith to
+which it still clings, and faith will cast off its elements of unbelief.
+That will be an inestimable advantage. Had the Time-spirit continued to
+make concessions, concessions would constantly have been made to it in
+return." Therefore the man who "calmly and deliberately laid hands upon
+the Lord's anointed, undeterred by the vision of the millions who have
+bowed the knee, and still bow the knee, before His appearing," has in his
+own way done a service.
+
+Strauss on his part escaped with relief from the musty atmosphere of the
+study--beloved by theology in carpet-slippers--to the bracing air of
+Hengstenberg's _Kirchenzeitung_. In his "Replies" he devotes to it some
+fifty-four pages. "I must admit," he says, "that it is a satisfaction to
+me to have to do with the _Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_. In dealing with
+it one knows where one is and what one has to expect. If Herr Hengstenberg
+condemns, he knows why he condemns, and even one against whom he launches
+his anathema must admit that the attitude becomes him. Any one who, like
+the editor of the _Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_, has taken upon him the
+yoke of confessional doctrine with all its implications, has paid a price
+which entitles him to the privilege of condemning those who differ from
+his opinions."(60)
+
+Hengstenberg's only complaint against Strauss is that he does not go far
+enough. He would have liked to force upon him the role of the Wolfenbuettel
+Fragmentist, and considers that if Strauss did not, like the latter, go so
+far as to suppose the apostles guilty of deliberate deceit, that is not so
+much from any regard for the historical kernel of Christianity as in order
+to mask his attack.
+
+Even in Catholic theology Strauss's work caused a great sensation.
+Catholic theology in general did not at that time take up an attitude of
+absolute isolation from Protestant scholarship; it had adopted from the
+latter numerous rationalistic ideas, and had been especially influenced by
+Schleiermacher. Thus, Catholic scholars were almost prepared to regard
+Strauss as a common enemy, against whom it was possible to make common
+cause with Protestants. In 1837 Joseph Mack, one of the Professors of the
+Catholic faculty at Tuebingen, published his "Report on Herr Dr. Strauss's
+Historical Study of the Life of Jesus."(61) In 1839 appeared "Dr.
+Strauss's Life of Jesus, considered from the Catholic point of view,"(62)
+by Dr. Maurus Hagel, Professor of Theology at the Lyceum at Dillingen; in
+1840 that lover of hypotheses and doughty fighter, Johann Leonhard
+Hug,(63) presented his report upon the work.(64)
+
+Even French Catholicism gave some attention to Strauss's work. This marks
+an epoch--the introduction of the knowledge of German critical theology
+into the intellectual world of the Latin nations. In the _Revue des deux
+mondes_ for December 1838, Edgar Quinet gave a clear and accurate account
+of the influence of the Hegelian philosophy upon the religious ideas of
+cultured Germany.(65) In an eloquent peroration he lays bare the danger
+which was menacing the Church from the nation of Strauss and Hegel. His
+countrymen need not think that it could be charmed away by some ingenious
+formula; a mighty effort of the Catholic spirit was necessary, if it was
+to be successfully opposed. "A new barbarian invasion was rolling up
+against sacred Rome. The barbarians were streaming from every quarter of
+the horizon, bringing their strange gods with them and preparing to
+beleaguer the holy city. As, of yore, Leo went forth to meet Attila, so
+now let the Papacy put on its purple and come forth, while yet there is
+time, to wave back with an authoritative gesture the devastating hordes
+into that moral wilderness which is their native home."
+
+Quinet might have done better still if he had advised the Pope to issue,
+as a counterblast to the unbelieving critical work of Strauss, the Life of
+Jesus which had been _revealed_ to the faith of the blessed Anna Katharina
+Emmerich.(66) How thoroughly this refuted Strauss can be seen from the
+fragment issued in 1834, "The Bitter Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ,"
+where even the age of Jesus on the day of His death is exactly given. On
+that Maundy Thursday the 13th Nisan, it was exactly thirty-three years and
+eighteen weeks less one day. The "pilgrim" Clement Brentano would
+certainly have consented, had he been asked, to allow his note-books to be
+used in the sacred cause, and to have given to the world the Life of Jesus
+as it was revealed to him by this visionary from the end of July 1820 day
+by day for three years, instead of allowing this treasure to remain hidden
+for more than twenty years longer. He himself ascribed to these visions
+the most strictly historical character, and insisted on considering them
+not merely as reflections on what had happened, but as the immediate
+reflex of the facts themselves, so that the picture of the life of Jesus
+is given in them as in a mirror. Hug, it may be mentioned, in his
+lectures, called attention to the exact agreement of the topography of the
+passion story in Katharina's vision with the description of the locality
+in Josephus. If he had known her complete Life of Jesus he would doubtless
+have expressed his admiration for the way in which she harmonises John and
+the Synoptists; and with justice, for the harmony is really ingenious and
+skilfully planned.
+
+Apart from these merits, too, this Life of Jesus, written, it should be
+observed, earlier than Strauss's, contains a wealth of interesting
+information. John at first baptized at Aenon, but later was directed to
+remove to Jericho. The baptisms took place in "baptismal springs."
+
+Peter owned three boats, of which one was fitted up especially for the use
+of Jesus, and carried a complement of ten persons. Forward and aft there
+were covered-in spaces where all kinds of gear could be kept, and where
+also they could wash their feet; along the sides of the boat were hung
+receptacles for the fish.
+
+When Judas Iscariot became a disciple of Jesus he was twenty-five years
+old. He had black hair and a red beard, but could not be called really
+ugly. He had had a stormy past. His mother had been a dancing-woman, and
+Judas had been born out of wedlock, his father being a military tribune in
+Damascus. As an infant he had been exposed, but had been saved, and later
+had been taken charge of by his uncle, a tanner at Iscariot. At the time
+when he joined the company of Jesus' disciples he had squandered all his
+possessions. The disciples at first liked him well enough because of his
+readiness to make himself useful; he even cleaned the shoes.
+
+The fish with the _stater_ in its mouth was so large that it made a full
+meal for the whole company.
+
+A work to which Jesus devoted special attention--though this is not
+mentioned in the Gospels--was the reconciliation of unhappy married
+couples. Another matter which is not mentioned in the Gospels is the
+voyage of Jesus to Cyprus, upon which He entered after a farewell meal
+with His disciples at the house of the Canaanitish woman. This voyage took
+place during the war between Herod and Aretas while the disciples were
+making their missionary journey in Palestine. As they could not give an
+eyewitness report of it they were silent; nor did they make any mention of
+the feast to which the Proconsul at Salamis invited the Saviour. In regard
+to another journey, also, which Jesus made to the land of the wise men of
+the East, the "pilgrim's" oracle has the advantage of knowing more than
+the Evangelists.
+
+In spite of these additional traits a certain monotony is caused by the
+fact that the visionary, in order to fill in the tale of days in the three
+years, makes the persons known to us from the Gospel history meet with the
+Saviour on several occasions previous to the meeting narrated in the
+Gospels. Here the artificial character of the composition comes out too
+clearly, though in general a lively imagination tends to conceal this. And
+yet these naive embellishments and inventions have something rather
+attractive about them; one cannot handle the book without a certain
+reverence when one thinks amid what pains these revelations were received.
+If Brentano had published his notes at the time of the excitement produced
+by Strauss's Life of Jesus, the work would have had a tremendous success.
+As it was, when the first two volumes appeared at the end of the 'fifties,
+there were sold in one year three thousand and several hundred copies,
+without reckoning the French edition which appeared contemporaneously.
+
+In the end, however, all the efforts of the mediating theology, of
+rationalism and supernaturalism, could do nothing to shake Strauss's
+conclusion that it was all over with supernaturalism as a factor to be
+reckoned with in the historical study of the Life of Jesus, and that
+scientific theology, instead of turning back from rationalism to
+supernaturalism, must move straight onward between the two and seek out a
+new path for itself. The Hegelian method had proved itself to be the logic
+of reality. With Strauss begins the period of the non-miraculous view of
+the Life of Jesus; all other views exhausted themselves in the struggle
+against him, and subsequently abandoned position after position without
+waiting to be attacked. The separation which Hengstenberg had hailed with
+such rejoicing was really accomplished; but in the form that
+supernaturalism practically separated itself from the serious study of
+history. It is not possible to date the stages of this process. After the
+first outburst of excitement everything seems to go on as quietly as
+before; the only difference is that the question of miracle constantly
+falls more and more into the background. In the modern period of the study
+of the Life of Jesus, which begins about the middle of the 'sixties, it
+has lost all importance.
+
+That does not mean that the problem of miracle is solved. From the
+historical point of view it is really impossible to solve it, since we are
+not able to reconstruct the process by which a series of miracle stories
+arose, or a series of historical occurrences were transformed into miracle
+stories, and these narratives must simply be left with a question mark
+standing against them. What has been gained is only that the exclusion of
+miracle from our view of history has been universally recognised as a
+principle of criticism, so that miracle no longer concerns the historian
+either positively or negatively. Scientific theologians of the present day
+who desire to show their "sensibility," ask no more than that two or three
+little miracles may be left to them--in the stories of the childhood,
+perhaps, or in the narratives of the resurrection. And these miracles are,
+moreover, so far scientific that they have at least no relation to those
+in the text, but are merely spiritless, miserable little toy-dogs of
+criticism, flea-bitten by rationalism, too insignificant to do historical
+science any harm, especially as their owners honestly pay the tax upon
+them by the way in which they speak, write, and are silent about Strauss.
+
+But even that is better than the delusive fashion in which some writers of
+the present day succeed in discussing the narratives of the resurrection
+"as pure historians" without betraying by a single word whether they
+themselves believe it to be possible or not. But the reason modern
+theology can allow itself these liberties is that the foundation laid by
+Strauss is unshakable.
+
+Compared with the problem of miracle, the question regarding the mythical
+explanation of the history takes a very subordinate place in the
+controversy. Few understood what Strauss's real meaning was; the general
+impression was that he entirely dissolved the life of Jesus into myth.
+
+There appeared, indeed, three satires ridiculing his method. One showed
+how, for the historical science of the future, the life of Luther would
+also become a mere myth,(67) the second treated the life of Napoleon in
+the same way;(68) in the third, Strauss himself becomes a myth.(69)
+
+M. Eugene Mussard, "candidat au saint ministere," made it his business to
+set at rest the minds of the premier faculty at Geneva by his thesis, _Du
+systeme mythique applique a l'histoire de la vie de Jesus_, 1838, which
+bears the ingenious motto {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} (not ... in cunningly
+devised myths, 2 Peter i. 16). He certainly did not exaggerate the
+difficulties of his task, but complacently followed up an "Exposition of
+the Mythical Theory," with a "Refutation of the Mythical Theory as applied
+to the Life of Jesus."
+
+The only writer who really faced the problem in the form in which it had
+been raised by Strauss was Wilke in his work "Tradition and Myth."(70) He
+recognises that Strauss had given an exceedingly valuable impulse towards
+the overcoming of rationalism and supernaturalism and to the rejection of
+the abortive mediating theology. "A keener criticism will only establish
+the truth of the Gospel, putting what is tenable on a firmer basis,
+sifting out what is untenable, and showing up in all its nakedness the
+counterfeit theology of the new evangelicalism with its utter lack of
+understanding and sincerity." Again, "the approval which Strauss has met
+with, and the excitement which he has aroused, sufficiently show what an
+advantage rationalistic speculation possesses over the theological second-
+childishness of the new evangelicals." The time has come for a rational
+mysticism, which shall preserve undiminished the honesty of the old
+rationalism, making no concessions to supernaturalism, but, on the other
+hand, overcoming the "truculent rationalism of the Kantian criticism" by
+means of a religious conception in which there is more warmth and more
+pious feeling.
+
+This rational mysticism makes it a reproach against the "mythical
+idealism" of Strauss that in it philosophy does violence to history, and
+the historic Christ only retains His significance as a mere ideal. A new
+examination of the sources is necessary to decide upon the extent of the
+mythical element.
+
+The Gospel of Matthew cannot, Wilke agrees, have been the work of an
+eyewitness. "The principal argument against its authenticity is the
+absence of the characteristic marks of an eyewitness, which must
+necessarily have been present in a gospel actually composed by a disciple
+of the Lord, and which are not present here. The narrative is lacking in
+precision, fragmentary and legendary, tradition everywhere manifest in its
+very form." There are discrepancies in the legends of the first and second
+chapters, as well as elsewhere, _e.g._ the stories of the baptism, the
+temptation, and the transfiguration. In other cases, where there is a
+basis of historic fact, there is an admixture of legendary material, as in
+the narratives of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
+
+In the Gospel of Mark, Wilke recognises the pictorial vividness of many of
+the descriptions, and conjectures that in some way or other it goes back
+to the Petrine tradition. The author of the Fourth Gospel is not an
+eyewitness; the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~} (according to) only indicates the origin of the
+tradition; the author received it, either directly or indirectly, from the
+Apostle, but he gave to it the gnosticising dialectical form of the
+Alexandrian theology.
+
+As against the _Diegesentheorie_(71) Wilke defends the independence and
+originality of the individual Gospels. "No one of the Evangelists knew the
+writing of any of the others, each produced an independent work drawn from
+a separate source."
+
+In the remarks on points of detail in this work of Wilke's there is
+evidence of a remarkable grasp of the critical data; we already get a hint
+of the "mathematician" of the Synoptic problem, who, two years later, was
+to work out convincingly the literary argument for the priority of Mark.
+But the historian is quite subordinated to the literary critic, and, when
+all is said, Wilke takes up no clearly defined position in regard to
+Strauss's main problem, as is evident from his seeking to retain, on more
+or less plausible grounds, a whole series of miracles, among them the
+miracle of Cana and the resurrection.
+
+For most thinkers of that period, however, the question "myth or history"
+yielded in interest to the philosophical question of the relation of the
+historical Jesus to the ideal Christ. That was the second problem raised
+by Strauss. Some thought to refute him by showing that his exposition of
+the relation of the Jesus of history to the ideal Christ was not justified
+even from the point of view of the Hegelian philosophy, arguing that the
+edifice which he had raised was not in harmony with the ground-plan of the
+Hegelian speculative system. He therefore felt it necessary, in his reply
+to the review in the _Jahrbuecher fuer wissenschaftliche Kritik_, to expound
+"the general relationship of the Hegelian philosophy to theological
+criticism,"(72) and to express in more precise form the thoughts upon
+speculative and historical Christology which he had suggested at the close
+of the second volume of his "Life of Jesus."
+
+He admits that Hegel's philosophy is ambiguous in this matter, since it is
+not clear "whether the evangelical fact as such, not indeed in its
+isolation, but together with the whole series of manifestations of the
+idea (of God-manhood) in the history of the world, is the truth; or
+whether the embodiment of the idea in that single fact is only a formula
+of which consciousness makes use in forming its concept." The Hegelian
+"right," he says, represented by Marheineke and Goeschel, emphasises the
+positive side of the master's religious philosophy, implying that in Jesus
+the idea of God-manhood was perfectly fulfilled and in a certain sense
+intelligibly realised. "If these men," Strauss explains, "appeal to Hegel
+and declare that he would not have recognised my book as an expression of
+his meaning, they say nothing which is not in accordance with my own
+convictions. Hegel was personally no friend to historical criticism. It
+annoyed him, as it annoyed Goethe, to see the historic figures of
+antiquity, on which their thoughts were accustomed lovingly to dwell,
+assailed by critical doubts. Even if it was in some cases wreaths of mist
+which they took for pinnacles of rock, they did not want to have this
+forced upon their attention, nor to be disturbed in the illusion from
+which they were conscious of receiving an elevating influence."
+
+But though prepared to admit that he had added to the edifice of Hegel's
+religious philosophy an annexe of historical criticism, of which the
+master would hardly have approved, Strauss is convinced that he is the
+only logical representative of Hegel's essential view. "The question which
+can be decided from the standpoint of the philosophy of religion is not
+whether what is narrated in the Gospels actually happened or not, but
+whether in view of the truth of certain conceptions it must necessarily
+have happened. And in regard to this, what I assert is that from the
+general system of the Hegelian philosophy it by no means necessarily
+follows that such an event must have happened, but that from the
+standpoint of the system the truth of that history from which actually the
+conception arose is reduced to a matter of indifference; it may have
+happened, but it may just as well not have happened, and the task of
+deciding on this point may be calmly handed over to historical criticism."
+
+Strauss reminds us that, even according to Hegel, the belief in Jesus as
+God-made-man is not immediately given with His appearing in the world of
+sense, but only arose after His death and the removal of His sensible
+presence. The master himself had acknowledged the existence of mythical
+elements in the Life of Jesus; in regard to miracle he had expressed the
+opinion that the true miracle was "Spirit." The conception of the
+resurrection and ascension as outward facts of sense was not recognised by
+him as true.
+
+Hegel's authority may, no doubt, fairly be appealed to by those who
+believe, not only in an incarnation of God in a general sense, "but also
+that this manifestation of God in flesh has taken place in this man
+(Jesus) at this definite time and place."... "In making the assertion,"
+concludes Strauss, "that the truth of the Gospel narrative cannot be
+proved, whether in whole or in part, from philosophical considerations,
+but that the task of inquiring into its truth must be left to historical
+criticism, I should like to associate myself with the 'left wing' of the
+Hegelian school, were it not that the Hegelians prefer to exclude me
+altogether from their borders, and to throw me into the arms of other
+systems of thought--only, it must be admitted, to have me tossed back to
+them like a ball."
+
+In regard to the third problem which Strauss had offered for discussion,
+the relation of the Synoptists to John, there was practically no response.
+The only one of his critics who understood what was at stake was
+Hengstenberg. He alone perceived the significance of the fact that
+critical theology, having admitted mythical elements first in the Old
+Testament, and then in the beginning and end of the Gospel history, and
+having, in consequence of the latter admission, felt obliged to give up
+the first three Gospels, retaining only the fourth, was now being besieged
+by Strauss in its last stronghold. "They withdrew," says the _Evangelische
+Kirchenzeitung_, "into the Gospel of John as into a fortress, and boasted
+that they were safe there, though they could not suppress a secret
+consciousness that they only held it at the enemy's pleasure; now the
+enemy has appeared before it; he is using the same weapons with which he
+was formerly victorious; the Gospel of John is in as desperate case as
+formerly the Synoptists. The time has come to make a bold resolve, a
+decisive choice; either they must give up everything, or else they must
+successively re-occupy the more advanced positions which at an earlier
+date they had successively abandoned." It would be impossible to give a
+more accurate picture of the desperate position into which Hase and
+Schleiermacher had brought the mediating theology by their ingenious
+expedient of giving up the Synoptics in favour of the Gospel of John.
+Before any danger threatened, they had abandoned the outworks and
+withdrawn into the citadel, oblivious of the fact that they thereby
+exposed themselves to the danger of having their own guns turned upon them
+from the positions they had abandoned, and being obliged to surrender
+without striking a blow the position of which they had boasted as
+impregnable. It is impossible to emphasise strongly enough the fact that
+it was not Strauss, but Hase and Schleiermacher, who had brought the
+mediating theology into this hopeless position, in which the fall of the
+Fourth Gospel carried with it the surrender of the historical tradition as
+a whole.
+
+But there is no position so desperate that theology cannot find a way out
+of it. The mediating theologians simply ignored the problem which Strauss
+had raised. As they had been accustomed to do before, so they continued to
+do after, taking the Gospel of John as the authentic framework, and
+fitting into it the sections of the Synoptic narrative wherever place
+could best be found for them. The difference between the Johannine and
+Synoptic representations of Jesus' method of teaching, says Neander, is
+only apparently irreconcilable, and he calls out in support of this
+assertion all the reserves of old worn-out expedients and artifices, among
+others the argument that the Pauline Christology is only explicable as a
+combination of the Synoptic and Johannine views. Other writers who belong
+to the same apologetic school, such as Tholuck, Ebrard,(73) Wieseler,(74)
+Lange,(75) and Ewald,(76) maintain the same point of view, only that their
+defence is usually much less skilful.
+
+The only writer who really in some measure enters into the difficulties is
+Ammon. He, indeed, is fully conscious of the difference, and thinks we
+cannot rest content with merely recognising it, but must find a solution,
+even if rather a forced one, "by subordinating the indefinite
+chronological data of the Synoptists, of whom, after all, only one was, or
+could have been, an eyewitness, to the ordered narrative of John." The
+fourth Evangelist makes so brief a reference to the Galilaean period
+because it was in accordance with his plan to give more prominence to the
+discourses of Jesus in the Temple and His dialogues with the Scribes as
+compared to the parables and teaching given to the people. The cleansing
+of the Temple falls at the outset of Jesus' ministry; Jesus begins His
+Messianic work in Jerusalem by this action of making an end of the
+unseemly chaffering in the court of the Temple. The question regarding the
+relative authenticity of the reports is decisively settled by a comparison
+of the two accounts of the triumphal entry, because there it is quite
+evident that "Matthew, the chief authority among the Synoptists, adapts
+his narrative to his special Jewish-Messianic standpoint." According to
+Ammon's rationalistic view, the work of Jesus consisted precisely in the
+transformation of this Jewish-Messianic idea into the conception of a
+"Saviour of the world." In this lies the explanation of the fate of Jesus:
+"The mass of the Jewish people were not prepared to receive a Christ so
+spiritual as Jesus was, since they were not ripe for so lofty a view of
+religion."
+
+Ammon here turns his Kantian philosophy to account. It serves especially
+to explain to him the consciousness of pre-existence avowed by the Jesus
+of the Johannine narrative as something purely human. We, too, he
+explains, can "after the spirit" claim an ideal existence prior to the
+spatial creation without indulging any delusion, and without, on the other
+hand, thinking of a real existence. In this way Jesus is for Himself a
+Biblical idea, with which He has become identified. "The purer and deeper
+a man's self-consciousness is, the keener may his consciousness of God
+become, until time disappears for him, and his partaking in the Divine
+nature fills his whole soul."
+
+But Ammon's support of the authenticity of John's Gospel is, even from a
+purely literary point of view, not so unreserved as in the case of the
+other opponents of Strauss. In the background stands the hypothesis that
+our Gospel is only a working-over of the authentic John, a suggestion in
+regard to which Ammon can claim priority, since he had made it as early as
+1811,(77) nine years before the appearance of Bretschneider's
+_Probabilia_. Were it not for the ingenuous fashion in which he works the
+Synoptic material into the Johannine plan, we might class him with
+Alexander Schweizer and Weisse, who in a similar way seek to meet the
+objections of Strauss by an elaborate theory of editing.(78)
+
+The first stage of the discussion regarding the relation of John to the
+Synoptists passed without result. The mediating theology continued to hold
+its positions undisturbed--and, strangest of all, Strauss himself was eager
+for a suspension of hostilities.
+
+It is as though history took the trouble to countersign the genuineness of
+the great critical discoveries by letting the discoverers themselves
+attempt to cancel them. As Kant disfigures his critical idealism by making
+inconsistent additions in order to refute a reviewer who had put him in
+the same category with Berkeley, so Strauss inserts additions and
+retractations in the third edition of his Life of Jesus in deference to
+the uncritical works of Tholuck and Neander! Wilke, the only one of his
+critics from whom he might have learned something, he ignores. "From the
+lofty vantage ground of Tholuck's many-sided knowledge I have sometimes,
+in spite of a slight tendency to vertigo, gained a juster point of view
+from which to look at one matter or another," is the avowal which he makes
+in the preface to this ill-starred edition.
+
+It would, indeed, have done no harm if he had confined himself to stating
+more exactly here and there the extent of the mythical element, had
+increased the number of possible cures, had inclined a little less to the
+negative side in examining the claims of reported facts to rank as
+historical, and had been a little more circumspect in pointing out the
+factors which produced the myths; the serious thing was that he now began
+to hesitate in his denial of the historical character of the Fourth
+Gospel--the very foundation of his critical view.
+
+A renewed study of it, aided by De Wette's commentary and Neander's Life
+of Jesus, had made him "doubtful about his doubts regarding the
+genuineness and credibility of this Gospel." "Not that I am convinced of
+its genuineness," he admits, "but I am no longer convinced that it is not
+genuine."
+
+He feels bound, therefore, to state whatever makes in its favour, and to
+leave open a number of possibilities which formerly he had not recognised.
+The adhesion of the first disciples may, he now thinks, have happened
+essentially in the form in which it is reported in the Fourth Gospel; in
+transferring the cleansing of the Temple to the first period of Jesus'
+ministry, John may be right as against the Synoptic tradition "which has
+no decisive evidence in its favour"; in regard to the question whether
+Jesus had been only once, or several times, in Jerusalem, his opinion now
+is that "on this point the superior circumstantiality of the Fourth Gospel
+cannot be contested."
+
+As regards the prominence allowed to the eschatology also all is toned
+down and softened. Everywhere feeble compromises! But what led Strauss to
+place his foot upon this shelving path was the essentially just perception
+that the Synoptists gave him no clearly ordered plan to set against that
+of the Fourth Gospel; consequently he felt obliged to make some
+concessions to its strength in this respect.
+
+Yet he recognised almost immediately that the result was a mere patchwork.
+Even in the summer of 1839 he complained to Hase in conversation that he
+had been deafened by the clamour of his opponents, and had conceded too
+much to them.(79) In the fourth edition he retracted all his concessions.
+"The Babel of voices of opponents, critics, and supporters," he says in
+his preface, "to which I had felt it my duty to listen, had confused me in
+regard to the idea of my work; in my diligent comparison of various views
+I had lost sight of the thing itself. In this way I was led to make
+alterations which, when I came to consider the matter calmly, surprised
+myself; and in making which it was obvious that I had done myself an
+injustice. In all these passages the earlier text has been restored, and
+my work has therefore consisted, it might be said, in removing from my
+good sword the notches which had not so much been hewn in it by the enemy
+as ground into it by myself."
+
+Strauss's vacillation had, therefore, not even been of any indirect
+advantage to him. Instead of endeavouring to find a purposeful connexion
+in the Synoptic Gospels by means of which he might test the plan of the
+Fourth Gospel, he simply restores his former view unaltered, thereby
+showing that in the decisive point it was incapable of development. In the
+very year in which he prepared his improved edition, Weisse, in his
+_Evangelische Geschichte_, had set up the hypothesis that Mark is the
+ground-document, and had thus carried criticism past the "dead-point"
+which Strauss had never been able to overcome. Upon Strauss, however, the
+new suggestion made no impression. He does, it is true, mention Weisse's
+book in the preface to his third edition, and describes it as "in many
+respects a very satisfactory piece of work." It had appeared too late for
+him to make use of it in his first volume; but he did not use it in his
+second volume either. He had, indeed, a distinct antipathy to the Marcan
+hypothesis.
+
+It was unfortunate that in this controversy the highly important
+suggestions in regard to various historical problems which had been made
+incidentally in the course of Strauss's work were never discussed at all.
+The impulse in the direction of progress which might have been given by
+his treatment of the relation of Jesus to the law, of the question
+regarding His particularism, of the eschatological conception, the Son of
+Man, and the Messiahship of Jesus, wholly failed to take effect, and it
+was only after long and circuitous wanderings that theology again came in
+sight of these problems from an equally favourable point of view. In this
+respect Strauss shared the fate of Reimarus; the positive solutions of
+which the outlines were visible behind their negative criticism escaped
+observation in consequence of the offence caused by the negative side of
+their work; and even the authors themselves failed to realise their full
+significance.
+
+
+
+
+
+X. THE MARCAN HYPOTHESIS
+
+
+    _Christian Hermann Weisse._ Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch
+    und philosophisch bearbeitet. (A Critical and Philosophical Study
+    of the Gospel History.) 2 vols. Leipzig, Breitkopf and Haertel,
+    1838. Vol. i. 614 pp. Vol. ii. 543 pp.
+
+    _Christian Gottlob Wilke._ Der Urevangelist. (The Earliest
+    Evangelist.) 1838. Dresden and Leipzig. 694 pp.
+
+    _Christian Hermann Weisse._ Die Evangelienfrage in ihrem
+    gegenwaertigen Stadium. (The Present Position of the Problem of the
+    Gospels.) Leipzig, 1856.
+
+
+The "Gospel History" of Weisse was written, like Strauss's Life of Jesus,
+by a philosopher who had been driven out of philosophy and forced back
+upon theology. Weisse was born in 1801 at Leipzig, and became Professor
+Extraordinary of Philosophy in the university there in 1828. In 1837,
+finding his advance to the Ordinary Professorship barred by the
+Herbartians, he withdrew from academic teaching and gave himself to the
+preparation of this work, the plan of which he had had in mind for some
+time. Having brought it to a satisfactory completion, he began again in
+1841 as a Privat-Docent in Philosophy, and became Ordinary Professor in
+1845. From 1848 onwards he lectured on Theology also. His work on
+"Philosophical Dogmatics, or the Philosophy of Christianity,"(80) is well
+known. He died in 1866, of cholera. Lotze and Lipsius were both much
+influenced by him.
+
+Weisse admired Strauss and hailed his Life of Jesus as a forward step
+towards the reconciliation of religion and philosophy. He expresses his
+gratitude to him for clearing the ground of the primeval forest of
+theology, thus rendering it possible for him (Weisse) to develop his views
+without wasting time upon polemics, "since most of the views which have
+hitherto prevailed may be regarded as having received the _coup de grace_
+from Strauss." He is at one with Strauss also in his general view of the
+relations of philosophy and religion, holding that it is only if
+philosophy, by following its own path, attains independently to the
+conviction of the truth of Christianity that its alliance with theology
+and religion can be welcomed as advantageous.(81) His work, therefore,
+like that of Strauss, leads up finally to a philosophical exposition in
+which he shows how for us the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of
+faith.(82)
+
+Weisse is the direct continuator of Strauss. Standing outside the
+limitations of the Hegelian formulae, he begins at the point where Strauss
+leaves off. His aim is to discover, if possible, some thread of general
+connexion in the narratives of the Gospel tradition, which, if present,
+would represent a historically certain element in the Life of Jesus, and
+thus serve as a better standard by which to determine the extent of myth
+than can possibly be found in the subjective impression upon which Strauss
+relies. Strauss, by way of gratitude, called him a dilettante. This was
+most unjust, for if any one deserved to share Strauss's place of honour,
+it was certainly Weisse.
+
+The idea that Mark's Gospel might be the earliest of the four, first
+occurred to Weisse during the progress of his work. In March 1837, when he
+reviewed Tholuck's "Credibility of the Gospel History," he was as innocent
+of this discovery as Wilke was at the same period. But when once he had
+observed that the graphic details of Mark, which had hitherto been
+regarded as due to an attempt to embellish an epitomising narrative, were
+too insignificant to have been inserted with this purpose, it became clear
+to him that only one other possibility remained open, viz., that their
+absence in Matthew and Luke was due to omission. He illustrates this from
+the description of the first day of Jesus' ministry at Capernaum. "The
+relation of the first Evangelist to Mark," he avers, "in those portions of
+the Gospel which are common to both is, with few exceptions, mainly that
+of an epitomiser."
+
+The decisive argument for the priority of Mark is, even more than his
+graphic detail, the composition and arrangement of the whole. "It is true,
+the Gospel of Mark shows very distinct traces of having arisen out of
+spoken discourses, which themselves were by no means ordered and
+connected, but disconnected and fragmentary"--being, he means, in its
+original form based on notes of the incidents related by Peter. "It is not
+the work of an eyewitness, nor even of one who had had an opportunity of
+questioning eyewitnesses thoroughly and carefully; nor even of deriving
+assistance from inquirers who, on their part, had made a connected study
+of the subject, with a view to filling up the gaps and placing each
+individual part in its right position, and so articulating the whole into
+an organic unity which should be neither merely inward, nor on the other
+hand merely external." Nevertheless the Evangelist was guided in his work
+by a just recollection of the general course of the life of Jesus. "It is
+precisely in Mark," Weisse explains, "that a closer study unmistakably
+reveals that the incidental remarks (referring for the most part to the
+way in which the fame of Jesus gradually extended, the way the people
+began to gather round Him and the sick to besiege Him), far from shutting
+off and separating the different narratives, tend rather to unite them
+with each other, and so give the impression not of a series of anecdotes
+fortuitously thrown together, but of a connected history. By means of
+these remarks, and by many other connecting links which he works into the
+narration of the individual stories, Mark has succeeded in conveying a
+vivid impression of the stir which Jesus made in Galilee, and from Galilee
+to Jerusalem, of the gradual gathering of the multitudes to Him, of the
+growing intensity of loyalty in the inner circle of disciples, and as the
+counterpart of all this, of the growing enmity of the Pharisees and
+Scribes--an impression which mere isolated narratives, strung together
+without any living connexion, would not have sufficed to produce." A
+connexion of this kind is less clearly present in the other Synoptists,
+and is wholly lacking in John. The Fourth Gospel, by itself, would give us
+a completely false conception of the relation of Jesus to the people. From
+the content of its narratives the reader would form the impression that
+the attitude of the people towards Jesus was hostile from the very first,
+and that it was only in isolated occasions, for a brief moment, that Jesus
+by His miraculous acts inspired the people with astonishment rather than
+admiration; that, surrounded by a little company of disciples he contrived
+for a time to defy the enmity of the multitude, and that, having
+repeatedly provoked it by intemperate invective, he finally succumbed to
+it.
+
+The simplicity of the plan of Mark is, in Weisse's opinion, a stronger
+argument for his priority than the most elaborate demonstration; one only
+needs to compare it with the perverse design of Luke, who makes Jesus
+undertake a journey through Samaria. "How," asks Weisse, "in the case of a
+writer who does things of this kind can it be possible at this time of day
+to speak seriously of historical exactitude in the use of his sources?"
+
+To come down to detail, Weisse's argument for the priority of Mark rests
+mainly on the following propositions:--
+
+1. In the first and third Gospels, traces of a common plan are found only
+in those parts which they have in common with Mark, not in those which are
+common to them, but not to Mark also.
+
+2. In those parts which the three Gospels have in common, the "agreement"
+of the other two is mediated through Mark.
+
+3. In those sections which the First and Third Gospels have, but Mark has
+not, the agreement consists in the language and incidents, not in the
+order. Their common source, therefore, the "Logia" of Matthew, did not
+contain any type of tradition which gave an order of narration different
+from that of Mark.
+
+4. The divergences of wording between the two other Synoptists is in
+general greater in the parts where both have drawn on the Logia document
+than where Mark is their source.
+
+5. The first Evangelist reproduces this Logia-document more faithfully
+than Luke does; but his Gospel seems to have been of later origin.
+
+This historical argument for the priority of Mark was confirmed in the
+year in which it appeared by Wilke's work, "The Earliest Gospel,"(83)
+which treated the problem more from the literary side, and, to take an
+illustration from astronomy, supplied the mathematical confirmation of the
+hypothesis.
+
+In regard to the Gospel of John, Weisse fully shared the negative views of
+Strauss. What is the use, he asks, of keeping on talking about the plan of
+this Gospel, seeing that no one has yet succeeded in showing what that
+plan is? And for a very good reason: there is none. One would never guess
+from the Gospel of John that Jesus, until His departure from Galilee, had
+experienced almost unbroken success. It is no good trying to explain the
+want of plan by saying that John wrote with the purpose of supplementing
+and correcting his predecessors, and that his omissions and additions were
+determined by this purpose. Such a purpose is betrayed by no single word
+in the whole Gospel.
+
+The want of plan lies in the very plan itself. "It is a fixed idea, one
+may say, with the author of this Gospel, who had heard that Jesus had
+fallen a victim in Jerusalem to the hatred of the Jewish rulers,
+especially the Scribes, that he must represent Jesus as engaged, from His
+first appearance onward, in an unceasing struggle with 'the Jews'--whereas
+we know that the mass of the people, even to the last, in Jerusalem
+itself, were on the side of Jesus; so much so, indeed, that His enemies
+were only able to get Him into their power by means of a secret betrayal."
+
+In regard to the graphic descriptions in John, of which so much has been
+made, the case is no better. It is the graphic detail of a writer who
+desires to work up a vivid picture, not the natural touches of an
+eyewitness, and there are, moreover, actual inconsistencies, as in the
+case of the healing at the pool of Bethesda. The circumstantiality is due
+to the care of the author not to assume an acquaintance, on the part of
+his readers, with Jewish usages or the topography of Palestine. "A
+considerable proportion of the details are of such a character as
+inevitably to suggest that the narrator inserts them because of the
+trouble which it has cost him to orientate himself in regard to the scene
+of the action and the dramatis personae, his object being to spare his
+readers a similar difficulty; though he does not always go about it in the
+way best calculated to effect his purpose."
+
+The impossibility also that the historic Jesus can have preached the
+doctrine of the Johannine Christ, is as clear to Weisse as to Strauss. "It
+is not so much a picture of Christ that John sets forth, as a conception
+of Christ; his Christ does not speak _in_ His own Person, but _of_ His own
+Person."
+
+On the other hand, however, "the authority of the whole Christian Church
+from the second century to the nineteenth" carries too much weight with
+Weisse for him to venture altogether to deny the Johannine origin of the
+Gospel; and he seeks a middle path. He assumes that the didactic portions
+really, for the most part, go back to John the Apostle. "John," he
+explains, "drawn on by the interest of a system of doctrine which had
+formed itself in his mind, not so much as a direct reflex of the teaching
+of his Master, as on the basis of suggestions offered by that teaching in
+combination with a certain creative activity of his own, endeavoured to
+find this system also in the teaching of his Master."
+
+Accordingly, with this purpose, and originally for himself alone, not with
+the object of communicating it to others, he made an effort to exhibit, in
+the light of this system of thought, what his memory still retained of the
+discourses of the Lord. "The Johannine discourses, therefore, were
+recalled by a laborious effort of memory on the part of the disciple. When
+he found that his memory-image of his Master was threatening to dissolve
+into a mist-wraith, he endeavoured to impress the picture more firmly in
+his recollection, to connect and define its rapidly disappearing features,
+reconstructing it by the aid of a theory evolved by himself or drawn from
+elsewhere regarding the Person and work of the Master." For the portrait
+of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels the mind of the disciples who describe
+Him is a neutral medium; for the portrait in John it is a factor which
+contributes to the production of the picture. The same portrait is
+outlined by the apostle in the first epistle which bears his name.
+
+These tentative "essays," not originally intended for publication, came,
+after the death of the apostle, into the hands of his adherents and
+disciples, and they chose the form of a complete Life of Jesus as that in
+which to give them to the world. They, therefore, added narrative
+portions, which they distributed here and there among the speeches, often
+doing some violence to the latter in the process. Such was the origin of
+the Fourth Gospel.
+
+Weisse is not blind to the fact that this hypothesis of a Johannine basis
+in the Gospel is beset with the gravest--one might almost say with
+insuperable--difficulties. Here is a man who was an immediate disciple of
+the Lord, one who, in the Synoptic Gospels, in Acts, and in the Pauline
+letters, appears in a character which gives no hint of a coming spiritual
+metamorphosis, one, moreover, who at a relatively late period, when it
+might well have been supposed that his development was in all essentials
+closed (at the time of Paul's visit to Jerusalem, which falls at least
+fourteen years after Paul's conversion), was chosen, along with James and
+Peter, and in contrast with the apostles of the Gentiles, Paul and
+Barnabas, as an apostle of the Jews--"how is it possible," asks Weisse, "to
+explain and make it intelligible, that a man of these antecedents displays
+in his thought and speech, in fact in his whole mental attitude, a
+thoroughly Hellenistic stamp? How came he, the beloved disciple, who,
+according to this very Gospel which bears his name, was admitted more
+intimately than any other into the confidence of Jesus, how came he to
+clothe his Master in this foreign garb of Hellenistic speculation, and to
+attribute to Him this alien manner of speech? But, however difficult the
+explanation may be, whatever extreme of improbability may seem to us to be
+involved in the assumption of the Johannine authorship of the Epistle and
+of these essential elements of the Gospel, it is better to assent to the
+improbability, to submit to the burden of being forced to explain the
+inexplicable, than to set ourselves obstinately against the weight of
+testimony, against the authority of the whole Christian Church from the
+second century to the present day."
+
+There could be no better argument against the genuineness of the Fourth
+Gospel than just such a defence of its genuineness as this. In this form
+the hypothesis may well be destined to lead a harmless and never-ending
+life. What matters for the historical study of the Life of Jesus is simply
+that the Fourth Gospel should be ruled out. And that Weisse does so
+thoroughly that it is impossible to imagine its being done more
+thoroughly. The speeches, in spite of their apostolic authority, are
+unhistorical, and need not be taken into account in describing Jesus'
+system of thought. As for the unhappy redactor, who by adding the
+narrative pictures created the Gospel, all possibility of his reports
+being accurate is roundly denied, and as if that was not enough, he must
+put up with being called a bungler into the bargain. "I have, to tell the
+truth, no very high opinion of the literary art of the editor of the
+Johannine Gospel-document," says Weisse in his "Problem of the Gospels" of
+1856, which is the best commentary upon his earlier work.
+
+His treatment of the Fourth Gospel reminds us of the story that Frederic
+the Great once appointed an importunate office-seeker to the post of
+"Privy Councillor for War," on condition that he would never presume to
+offer a syllable of advice!
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+The hypothesis which was brought forward about the same time by Alexander
+Schweizer,(84) with the intention of saving the genuineness of the Gospel
+of John, did not make any real contribution to the subject. The reading of
+the facts which form his starting-point is almost the exact converse of
+that of Weisse, since he regards, not the speeches, but certain parts of
+the narrative as Johannine. That which it is possible, in his opinion, to
+refer to the apostle is an account, not involving any miracles, of the
+ministry of Jesus at Jerusalem, and the discourses which He delivered
+there. The more or less miraculous events which occur in the course of
+it--such as, that Jesus had seen Nathanael under the fig-tree, knew the
+past life of the Samaritan woman, and healed the sick man at the Pool of
+Bethesda--are of a simple character, and contrast markedly with those which
+are represented to have occurred in Galilee, where Jesus turned water into
+wine and fed a multitude with a few crusts of bread. We must, therefore,
+suppose that this short, authentic, spiritual Jerusalem-Gospel has had a
+Galilaean Life of Jesus worked into it, and this explains the
+inconsistencies of the representation and the oscillation between a
+sensuous and a spiritual point of view.
+
+This distinction, however, cannot be made good. Schweizer was obliged to
+ascribe the reports of a material resurrection to the Galilaean source,
+whereas these, since they exclude the Galilaean appearances of Jesus, must
+belong to the Jerusalem Gospel; and accordingly, the whole distinction
+between a spiritual and material Gospel falls to the ground. Thus this
+hypothesis at best preserves the nominal authenticity of the Fourth
+Gospel, only to deprive it immediately of all value as a historical
+source.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Had Strauss calmly examined the bearing of Weisse's hypothesis, he would
+have seen that it fully confirmed the line he had taken in leaving the
+Fourth Gospel out of account, and he might have been less unjust towards
+the hypothesis of the priority of Mark, for which he cherished a blind
+hatred, because, in its fully developed form, it first met him in
+conjunction with seemingly reactionary tendencies towards the
+rehabilitation of John. He never in the whole course of his life got rid
+of the prejudice that the recognition of the priority of Mark was
+identical with a retrograde movement towards an uncritical orthodoxy.
+
+This is certainly not true as regards Weisse. He is far from having used
+Mark unreservedly as a historical source. On the contrary, he says
+expressly that the picture which this Gospel gives of Jesus is drawn by an
+imaginative disciple of the faith, filled with the glory of his subject,
+whose enthusiasm is consequently sometimes stronger than his judgment.
+Even in Mark the mythopoeic tendency is already actively at work, so that
+often the task of historical criticism is to explain how such myths could
+have been accepted by a reporter who stands as near the facts as Mark
+does.
+
+Of the _miracula_(85)--so Weisse denominates the "non-genuine" miracles, in
+contradistinction to the "genuine"--the feeding of the multitude is that
+which, above all others, cries aloud for an explanation. Its historical
+strength lies in its being firmly interwoven with the preceding and
+following context; and this applies to both the Marcan narratives. It is
+therefore impossible to regard the story, as Strauss proposes to do, as
+pure myth; it is necessary to show how, growing out of some incident
+belonging to that context, it assumed its present literary form. The
+authentic saying about the leaven of the Pharisees, which, in Mark viii.
+14 and 15, is connected with the two miracles of feeding the multitude,
+gives ground for supposing that they rest upon a parabolic discourse
+repeated on two occasions, in which Jesus spoke, perhaps with allusion to
+the manna, of a miraculous food given through Him. These discourses were
+later transformed by tradition into an actual miraculous giving of food.
+Here, therefore, Weisse endeavours to substitute for Strauss's
+"unhistorical" conception of myth a different conception, which in each
+case seeks to discover a sufficient historical cause.
+
+The miracles at the baptism of Jesus are based upon His account of a
+vision which He experienced in that moment. The present form of the story
+of the transfiguration has a twofold origin. In the first place, it is
+partly based on a real experience shared by the three disciples. That
+there is an historical fact here is evident from the way in which it is
+connected with the context by a definite indication of time. The six days
+of Mark ix. 2 cannot really be connected, as Strauss would have us
+suppose, with Ex. xxiv. 16;(86) the meaning is simply that between the
+previously reported discourse of Jesus and the event described there was
+an interval of six days. The three disciples had a waking, spiritual
+vision, not a dream-vision, and what was revealed in this vision was the
+Messiahship of Jesus. But at this point comes in the second, the mythico-
+symbolical element. The disciples see Jesus accompanied, according to the
+Jewish Messianic expectations, by those whom the people thought of as His
+forerunners. He, however, turns away from them, and Moses and Elias, for
+whom the disciples were about to build tabernacles, for them to abide in,
+disappear. The mythical element is a reflection of the teaching which
+Jesus imparted to them on that occasion, in consequence of which there
+dawned on them the spiritual "significance of those expectations and
+predictions, which they were to recognise as no longer pointing forward to
+a future fulfilment, but as already fulfilled." The high mountain upon
+which, according to Mark, the event took place is not to be understood in
+a literal sense, but as symbolical of the sublimity of the revelation; it
+is to be sought not on the map of Palestine, but in the recesses of the
+spirit.
+
+The most striking case of the formation of myth is the story of the
+resurrection. Here, too, myth must have attached itself to an historical
+fact. The fact in question is not, however, the empty grave. This only
+came into the story later, when the Jews, in order to counteract the
+Christian belief in the resurrection, had spread abroad the report that
+the body had been stolen from the grave. In consequence of this report the
+empty grave had necessarily to be taken up into the story, the Christian
+account now making use of the fact that the body of Jesus was not found as
+a proof of His bodily resurrection. The emphasis laid on the identity of
+the body which was buried with that which rose again, of which the Fourth
+Evangelist makes so much, belongs to a time when the Church had to oppose
+the Gnostic conception of a spiritual, incorporeal immortality. The
+reaction against Gnosticism is, as Weisse rightly remarks, one of the most
+potent factors in the development of myth in the Gospel history. As an
+additional instance of this he might have cited the anti-gnostic form of
+the Johannine account of the baptism of Jesus.
+
+What, then, is the historical fact in the resurrection? "The historical
+fact," replies Weisse, "is only the existence of a belief--not the belief
+of the later Christian Church in the myth of the bodily resurrection of
+the Lord--but the personal belief of the Apostles and their companions in
+the miraculous presence of the risen Christ in the visions and appearances
+which they experienced." "The question whether those extraordinary
+phenomena which, soon after the death of the Lord, actually and undeniably
+took place within the community of His disciples, rest upon fact or
+illusion--that is, whether in them the departed spirit of the Lord, of
+whose presence the disciples supposed themselves to be conscious, was
+really present, or whether the phenomena were produced by natural causes
+of a different kind, spiritual and psychical, is a question which cannot
+be answered without going beyond the confines of purely historical
+criticism." The only thing which is certain is "that the resurrection of
+Jesus is a fact which belongs to the domain of the spiritual and psychic
+life, and which is not related to outward corporeal existence in such a
+way that the body which was laid in the grave could have shared therein."
+When the disciples of Jesus had their first vision of the glorified body
+of their Lord, they were far from Jerusalem, far from the grave, and had
+no thought of bringing that spiritual corporeity into any kind of relation
+with the dead body of the Crucified. That the earliest appearances took
+place in Galilee is indicated by the genuine conclusion of Mark, according
+to which the angel charges the women with the message that the disciples
+were to await Jesus in Galilee.
+
+Strauss's conception of myth, which failed to give it any point of vital
+connexion with the history, had not provided any escape from the dilemma
+offered by the rationalistic and supernaturalistic views of the
+resurrection. Weisse prepared a new historical basis for a solution. He
+was the first to handle the problem from a point of view which combined
+historical with psychological considerations, and he is fully conscious of
+the novelty and the far-reaching consequences of his attempt. Theological
+science did not overtake him for sixty years; and though it did not for
+the most part share his one-sidedness in recognising only the Galilaean
+appearances, that does not count for much, since it was unable to solve
+the problem of the double tradition regarding the appearances. His
+discussion of the question is, both from the religious and from the
+historical point of view, the most satisfying treatment of it with which
+we are acquainted; the pompous and circumspect utterances of the very
+latest theology in regard to the "empty grave" look very poor in
+comparison. Weisse's psychology requires only one correction--the insertion
+into it of the eschatological premise.
+
+It is not only the admixture of myth, but the whole character of the
+Marcan representation, which forbids us to use it without reserve as a
+source for the life of Jesus. The inventor of the Marcan hypothesis never
+wearies of repeating that even in the Second Gospel it is only the main
+outline of the Life of Jesus, not the way in which the various sections
+are joined together, which is historical. He does not, therefore, venture
+to write a Life of Jesus, but begins with a "General Sketch of the Gospel
+History" in which he gives the main outlines of the Life of Jesus
+according to Mark, and then proceeds to explain the incidents and
+discourses in each several Gospel in the order in which they occur.(87)
+
+He avoids the professedly historical forced interpretation of detail,
+which later representatives of the Marcan hypothesis, Schenkel in
+particular, employ in such distressing fashion that Wrede's book, by
+making an end of this inquisitorial method of extracting the Evangelist's
+testimony, may be said to have released the Marcan hypothesis from the
+torture-chamber. Weisse is free from these over-refinements. He refuses to
+divide the Galilaean ministry of Jesus into a period of success and a
+period of failure and gradual falling off of adherents, divided by the
+controversy about legal purity in Mark vii.; he does not allow this
+episode to counterbalance the general evidence that Jesus' public work was
+accompanied by a constantly growing success. Nor does it occur to him to
+conceive the sojourn of the Lord in Phoenician territory, and His journey
+to the neighbourhood of Caesarea Philippi, as a compulsory withdrawal from
+Galilee, an abandonment of His cause in that district, and to head the
+chapter, as was usual in the second period of the exegesis of Mark,
+"Flights and Retirements." He is content simply to state that Jesus once
+visited those regions, and explicitly remarks that while the Synoptists
+speak of the Pharisees and Scribes as working actively against Him, there
+is nowhere any hint of a hostile movement on the part of the people, but
+that, on the contrary, in spite of the Scribes and Pharisees the people
+are always ready to approve Him and take His part; so much so that His
+enemies can only hope to get Him into their power by a secret betrayal.
+
+Weisse does not admit any failure in Jesus' work, nor that death came upon
+Him from without as an inevitable necessity. He cannot, therefore, regard
+the thought of suffering as forced upon Jesus by outward events. Later
+interpreters of Mark have often held that the essential thing in the
+Lord's resolve to die was that by His voluntary acceptance of a fate which
+was more and more clearly revealing itself as inevitable, He raised it
+into the sphere of ethico-religious freedom: this was not Weisse's view.
+Jesus, according to him, was not moved by any outward circumstances when
+He set out for Jerusalem in order to die there. He did it in obedience to
+a supra-rational higher necessity. We can at most venture to conjecture
+that a cessation of His miracle-working power, of which He had become
+aware, revealed to Him that the hour appointed by God had come. He did, in
+fact, no further miracle in Jerusalem.
+
+How far Isaiah liii. may have contributed to suggest the conception of
+such a death being a necessary part of Messiah's work, it is impossible to
+discover. In the popular expectation there was no thought of the Messiah
+as suffering. The thought was conceived by Jesus independently, through
+His deep and penetrating spiritual insight. Without any external
+suggestion whatever He announces to His disciples that He is to die at
+Jerusalem, and that He is going thither with that end in view. He
+journeyed, not to the Passover, but to His death. The fact that it took
+place at the time of the Feast was, so far as Jesus was concerned,
+accidental. The circumstances of His entry were such as to suggest
+anything rather than the fulfilment of His predictions; but though the
+jubilant multitude surrounded Him day by day, as with a wall of defence,
+He did not let that make Him falter in His purpose; rather He forced the
+authorities to arrest Him; He preserved silence before Pilate with the
+deliberate purpose of rendering His death inevitable. The theory of later
+defenders of the Marcan hypothesis that Jesus, giving up His cause in
+Galilee for lost, went up to Jerusalem to conquer or die, is foreign to
+Weisse's conception. In his view, Jesus, breaking off His Galilaean work
+while the tide of success was still flowing strongly, journeyed to
+Jerusalem, in the scorn of consequence, with the sole purpose of dying
+there.
+
+It is true there are some premonitions of the later course of Marcan
+exegesis. The Second Gospel mentions no Passover journeys as falling in
+the course of the public ministry of Jesus; consequently the most natural
+conclusion would be that no Passover journeys fall within that period;
+that is, that Jesus' ministry began after one Passover and closed with the
+next, thus lasting less than a full year. Weisse thinks, however, that it
+is impossible to understand the success of His teaching unless we assume a
+ministry of several years, of more than three years, indeed. Mark does not
+mention the Feasts simply because Jesus did not go up to Jerusalem.
+"Intrinsic probability is, in our opinion, so strongly in favour of a
+duration of a considerable number of years, that we are at a loss to
+explain how it is that at least a few unprejudiced investigators have not
+found in this a sufficient reason for departing from the traditional
+opinion."
+
+The account of the mission of the Twelve is also, on the ground of
+"intrinsic probability," explained in a way which is not in accordance
+with the plain sense of the words. "We do not think," says Weisse, "that
+it is necessary to understand this in the sense that He sent all the
+twelve out at one time, two and two, remaining alone in the meantime; it
+is much more natural to suppose that He only sent them out two at a time,
+keeping the others about Him. The object of this mission was less the
+immediate spreading abroad of His teaching than the preparation of the
+disciples themselves for the independent activity which they would have to
+exercise after His death." These are, however, the only serious liberties
+which he takes with the statements of Mark.
+
+When did Jesus begin to think of Himself as the Messiah? The baptism seems
+to have marked an epoch in regard to His Messianic consciousness, but that
+does not mean that He had not previously begun to have such thoughts about
+Himself. In any case He did not on that occasion arrive all at once at
+that point of His inward journey which He had reached at the time of His
+first public appearance. We must assume a period of some duration between
+the baptism and the beginning of His ministry--a longer period than we
+should suppose from the Synoptists--during which Jesus cast off the
+Messianic ideas of Judaism and attained to a spiritual conception of the
+Messiahship. When He began to teach, His "development" was already closed.
+Later interpreters of Mark have generally differed from Weisse in assuming
+a development in the thought of Jesus during His public ministry.
+
+His conception of the Messiahship was therefore fully formed when He began
+to teach in Capernaum; but He did not allow the people to see that He held
+Himself to be the Messiah until His triumphal entry. It was in order to
+avoid declaring His Messiahship that He kept away from Jerusalem. "It was
+only in Galilee and not in the Jewish capital that an extended period of
+teaching and work was possible for Him without being obliged to make an
+explicit declaration whether He were the Messiah or no. In Jerusalem
+itself the High Priests and Scribes would soon have put this question to
+Him in such a way that He could not have avoided answering it, whereas in
+Galilee He doubtless on more than one occasion cut short such attempts to
+question Him too closely by the incisiveness of His replies." Like
+Strauss, Weisse recognises that the key to the explanation of the
+Messianic consciousness of Jesus lies in the self-designation "Son of
+Man." "We are most certainly justified," he says, with almost prophetic
+insight, in his "Problem of the Gospels," published in 1856, "in regarding
+the question, what sense the Divine Saviour desired to attach to this
+predicate?--what, in fact, He intended to make known about Himself by using
+the title Son of Man--as an essential question for the right understanding
+of His teaching, and not of His teaching only, but also of the very heart
+and inmost essence of His personality."
+
+But at this point Weisse lets in the cloven hoof of that fatal method of
+interpretation, by the aid of which the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis
+who succeeded him were to wage war, with a kind of dull and dogged
+determination, against eschatology, in the interests of an original and
+"spiritual" conception of the Messiahship supposed to be held by Jesus.
+Under the obsession of the fixed idea that it was their mission to defend
+the "originality" of Jesus by ascribing to Him a modernising
+transformation and spiritualisation of the eschatological system of ideas,
+the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis have impeded the historical study
+of the Life of Jesus to an almost unbelievable extent.
+
+The explanation of the name Son of Man had, Weisse explains, hitherto
+oscillated between two extremes. Some had held the expression to be, even
+in the mouth of Jesus, equivalent to "man" in general, an interpretation
+which cannot be carried through; others had connected it with the Son of
+Man in Daniel, and supposed that in using the term Jesus was employing a
+Messianic title understood by and current among the Jews. But how came He
+to employ only this unusual periphrastic name for the Messiah? Further, if
+this name were really a Messianic title, how could He repeatedly have
+refused Messianic salutations, and not until the triumphal entry suffered
+the people to hail Him as Messiah?
+
+The questions are rightly asked; it is therefore the more pity that they
+are wrongly answered. It follows, Weisse says, from the above
+considerations that Jesus did not assume an acquaintance on the part of
+His hearers with the Old Testament Messianic significance of the
+expression. "It was therefore incontestably the intention of Jesus--and any
+one who considers it unworthy betrays thereby his own want of insight--that
+the designation should have something mysterious about it, something which
+would compel His hearers to reflect upon His meaning." The expression Son
+of Man was calculated to lead them on to higher conceptions of His nature
+and origin, and therefore sums up in itself the whole spiritualisation of
+the Messiahship.
+
+Weisse, therefore, passionately rejects any suggestion, however modest,
+that Jesus' self-designation, Son of Man, implies any measure of
+acceptance of the Jewish apocalyptic system of ideas. Ewald had furnished
+forth his Life of Jesus(88) with a wealth of Old Testament learning, and
+had made some half-hearted attempts to show the connexion of Jesus' system
+of thought with that of post-canonical Judaism, but without taking the
+matter seriously and without having any suspicion of the real character of
+the eschatology of Jesus. But even these parade-ground tactics excite
+Weisse's indignation; in his book, published in 1856, he reproaches Ewald
+with failing to understand his task.
+
+The real duty of criticism is, according to Weisse, to show that Jesus had
+no part in those fantastic errors which are falsely attributed to Him when
+a literal Jewish interpretation is given to His great sayings about the
+future of the Son of Man, and to remove all the obstacles which seem to
+have prevented hitherto the recognition of the novel character and special
+significance of the expression, Son of Man, in the mouth of Him who, of
+His own free choice, applied this name to Himself. "How long will it be,"
+he cries, "before theology at last becomes aware of the deep importance of
+its task? Historical criticism, exercised with all the thoroughness and
+impartiality which alone can produce a genuine conviction, must free the
+Master's own teaching from the imputation that lies upon it--the imputation
+of sharing the errors and false expectations in which, as we cannot deny,
+owing to imperfect or mistaken understanding of the suggestions of the
+Master, the Apostles, and with them the whole early Christian Church,
+became involved."
+
+This fundamental position determines the remainder of Weisse's views.
+Jesus cannot have shared the Jewish particularism. He did not hold the Law
+to be binding. It was for this reason that He did not go up to the Feasts.
+He distinctly and repeatedly expressed the conviction that His doctrine
+was destined for the whole world. In speaking of the parousia of the Son
+of Man He was using a figure--a figure which includes in a mysterious
+fashion all His predictions of the future. He did not speak to His
+disciples of His resurrection, His ascension, and His parousia as three
+distinct acts, since the event to which He looked forward is not identical
+with any of the three, but is composed of them all. The resurrection is,
+at the same time, the ascension and parousia, and in the parousia the
+resurrection and the ascension are also included. "The one conclusion to
+which we believe we can point with certainty is that Jesus spoke of the
+future of His work and His teaching in a way that implied the
+consciousness of an influence to be continued after His death, whether
+unbrokenly or intermittently, and the consciousness that by this influence
+His work and teaching would be preserved from destruction and the final
+victory assured to it."
+
+The personal presence of Jesus which the disciples experienced after His
+death was in their view only a partial fulfilment of that general promise.
+The parousia appeared to them as still awaiting fulfilment. Thought of
+thus, as an isolated event, they could only conceive it from the Jewish
+apocalyptic standpoint, and they finally came to suppose that they had
+derived these fantastic ideas from the Master Himself.
+
+In his determined opposition to the recognition of eschatology in
+Strauss's first Life of Jesus, Weisse here lays down the lines which were
+to be followed by the "liberal" Lives of Jesus of the 'sixties and
+following years, which only differ from him, not always to their
+advantage, in their more elaborate interpretation of the detail of Mark.
+The only work, therefore, which was a conscious continuation of Strauss's,
+takes, in spite of its just appreciation of the character of the sources,
+a wrong path, led astray by the mistaken idea of the "originality" of
+Jesus, which it exalts into a canon of historical criticism. Only after
+long and devious wanderings did the study of the subject find the right
+road again. The whole struggle over eschatology is nothing else than a
+gradual elimination of Weisse's ideas. It was only with Johannes Weiss
+that theology escaped from the influence of Christian Hermann Weisse.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI. BRUNO BAUER. THE FIRST SCEPTICAL LIFE OF JESUS
+
+
+    Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes. (Criticism of
+    the Gospel History of John.) Bremen, 1840. 435 pp.
+
+    Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. (Criticism of
+    the Gospel History of the Synoptics.) 3 vols., Leipzig, 1841-1842;
+    vol. i. 416 pp.; vol. ii. 392 pp.; vol. iii. 341 pp.
+
+    Kritik der Evangelien. (Criticism of the Gospels.) 2 vols.,
+    1850-1851, Berlin.
+
+    Kritik der Apostelgeschichte. (Criticism of Acts.) 1850.
+
+    Kritik der Paulinischen Briefe. Berlin, 1850-1852. In three parts.
+
+    Philo, Strauss, Renan und das Urchristentum. (P., S., R., and
+    Primitive Christianity.) Berlin, 1874. 155 pp.
+
+    Christus und die Caesaren. Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem
+    roemischen Griechentum. (The Origin of Christianity from Graeco-
+    Roman Civilisation.) Berlin, 1877. 387 pp.
+
+
+Bruno Bauer was born in 1809 at Eisenberg, in the duchy of Sachsen-
+Altenburg. In philosophy, he was at first associated entirely with the
+Hegelian "right." Like Strauss, he received a strong impulse from Vatke.
+At this stage of his development he reviewed, in 1835 and 1836, Strauss's
+Life of Jesus in the _Jahrbuecher fuer wissenschaftliche Kritik_, and wrote
+in 1838 a "Criticism of the History of Revelation."(89)
+
+In 1834 he had become Privat-Docent in Berlin, but in 1839 he removed to
+Bonn. He was then in the midst of that intellectual crisis of which the
+evidence appeared in his critical works on John and the Synoptics. In
+August 1841 the Minister, Eichhorn, requested the Faculties of the
+Prussian Universities to report on the question whether Bauer should be
+allowed to retain the _venia docendi_. Most of them returned an evasive
+answer, Koenigsberg replied in the affirmative, and Bonn in the negative.
+In March 1842 Bauer was obliged to cease lecturing, and retired to Rixdorf
+near Berlin. In the first heat of his furious indignation over this
+treatment he wrote a work with the title "Christianity Exposed,"(90)
+which, however, was cancelled before publication at Zurich in 1843.
+
+He then turned his attention to secular history and wrote on the French
+Revolution, on Napoleon, on the Illuminism of the Eighteenth Century, and
+on the party struggles in Germany during the years 1842-1846. At the
+beginning of the 'fifties he returned to theological subjects, but failed
+to exercise any influence. His work was simply ignored.
+
+Radical though he was in spirit, Bauer found himself fighting, at the end
+of the 'fifties and beginning of the 'sixties, in the ranks of the
+Prussian Conservatives--we are reminded how Strauss in the Wuertemberg
+Chamber was similarly forced to side with the reactionaries. He died in
+1882. His was a pure, modest, and lofty character.
+
+At the time of his removal from Berlin to Bonn he was just at the end of
+the twenties, that critical age when pupils often surprise their teachers,
+when men begin to find themselves and show what they are, not merely what
+they have been taught.
+
+In approaching the investigation of the Gospel history, Bauer saw, as he
+himself tells us, two ways open to him. He might take as his starting-
+point the Jewish Messianic conception, and endeavour to answer the
+question how the intuitive prophetic idea of the Messiah became a fixed
+reflective conception. That was the historical method; he chose, however,
+the other, the literary method. This starts from the opposite side of the
+question, from the end instead of the beginning of the Gospel history.
+Taking first the Gospel of John, in which it is obvious that reflective
+thought has fitted the life of the Jewish Messiah into the frame of the
+Logos conception, he then, starting as it were from the embouchure of the
+stream, works his way upwards to the high ground in which the Gospel
+tradition takes its rise. The decision in favour of the latter view
+determined the character of Bauer's life-work; it was his task to follow
+out, to its ultimate consequences, the literary solution of the problem of
+the life of Jesus.
+
+How far this path would lead him he did not at first suspect. But he did
+suspect how strong was the influence upon the formation of history of a
+dominant idea which moulds and shapes it with a definite artistic purpose.
+His interest was especially arrested by Philo, who, without knowing or
+intending it, contributed to the fulfilment of a higher task than that
+with which he was immediately engaged. Bauer's view is that a speculative
+principle such as Philo's, when it begins to take possession of men's
+minds, influences them in the first glow of enthusiasm which it evokes
+with such overmastering power that the just claims of that which is actual
+and historical cannot always secure the attention which is their due. In
+Philo's pupil, John, we must look, not for history, but for art.
+
+The Fourth Gospel is in fact a work of art. This was now for the first
+time appreciated by one who was himself an artist. Schleiermacher, indeed,
+had at an earlier period taken up the aesthetic standpoint in considering
+this Gospel. But he had used it as an apologist, proceeding to exalt the
+artistic truth which he rightly recognised into historic reality, and his
+critical sense failed him, precisely because he was an aesthete and an
+apologist, when he came to deal with the Fourth Gospel. Now, however,
+there comes forward a true artist, who shows that the depth of religious
+and intellectual insight which Tholuck and Neander, in opposing Strauss,
+had urged on behalf of the Fourth Gospel, is--Christian art.
+
+In Bauer, however, the aesthete is at the same time a critic. Although
+much in the Fourth Gospel is finely "felt," like the opening scenes
+referring to the Baptist and to Jesus, which Bauer groups together under
+the heading "The Circle of the Expectant," yet his art is by no means
+always perfect. The author who conceived those discourses, of which the
+movement consists in a kind of tautological return upon itself, and who
+makes the parables trail out into dragging allegories, is no perfect
+artist. "The parable of the Good Shepherd," says Bauer, "is neither
+simple, nor natural, nor a true parable, but a metaphor, which is,
+nevertheless, much too elaborate for a metaphor, is not clearly conceived,
+and, finally, in places shows much too clearly the skeleton of reflection
+over which it is stretched."
+
+Bauer treats, in his work of 1840,(91) the Fourth Gospel only. The
+Synoptics he deals with only in a quite incidental fashion, "as opposing
+armies make demonstrations in order to provoke the enemy to a decisive
+conflict."
+
+He breaks off at the beginning of the story of the passion, because here
+it would be necessary to bring in the Synoptic parallels. "From the
+distant heights on which the Synoptic forces have taken up a menacing
+position, we must now draw them down into the plain; now comes the pitched
+battle between them and the Fourth Gospel, and the question regarding the
+historical character of that which we have found to be the ultimate basis
+of the last Gospel, can now at length be decided."
+
+If, in the Gospel of John, no smallest particle could be found which was
+unaffected by the creative reflection of the author, how will it stand
+with the Synoptists?
+
+When Bauer broke off his work upon John in this abrupt way--for he had not
+originally intended to conclude it at this point--how far did he still
+retain a belief in the historical character of the Synoptics? It looks as
+if he had intended to treat then as the solid foundation, in contrast with
+the fantastic structure raised upon it by the Fourth Gospel. But when he
+began to use his pick upon the rock, it crumbled away. Instead of a
+difference of kind he found only a difference of degree. The "Criticism of
+the Gospel History of the Synoptists" of 1841 is built on the site which
+Strauss had levelled. "The abiding influence of Strauss," says Bauer,
+"consists in the fact that he has removed from the path of subsequent
+criticism the danger and trouble of a collision with the earlier orthodox
+system."
+
+Bauer finds his material laid ready to his hand by Weisse and Wilke.
+Weisse had divined in Mark the source from which criticism--becoming barren
+in the work of Strauss--might draw a new spring of vigorous life; and
+Wilke, whom Bauer places above Weisse, had raised this happy conjecture to
+the level of a scientifically assured result. The Marcan hypothesis was no
+longer on its trial.
+
+But its bearing upon the history of Jesus had still to be determined. What
+position do Weisse and Wilke take up towards the hypothesis of a tradition
+lying behind the Gospel of Mark? If it be once admitted that the whole
+Gospel tradition, so far as concerns its plan, goes back to a single
+writer, who has created the connexion between the different events--for
+neither Weisse nor Wilke regards the connexion of the sections as
+historical--does not the possibility naturally suggest itself that the
+narrative of the events themselves, not merely the connexion in which they
+appear in Mark, is to be set down to the account of the author of the
+Gospel? Weisse and Wilke had not suspected how great a danger arises when,
+of the three witnesses who represent the tradition, only one is allowed to
+stand, and the tradition is recognised and allowed to exist in this one
+written form only. The triple embankment held; will a single one bear the
+strain?
+
+The following considerations have to be taken into account. The criticism
+of the Fourth Gospel compels us to recognise that a Gospel _may_ have a
+purely literary origin. This discovery dawned upon Bauer at a time when he
+was still disinclined to accept Wilke's conclusions regarding Mark. But
+when he had recognised the truth of the latter he felt compelled by the
+combination of the two to accept the idea that Mark also might be of
+purely literary origin. For Weisse and Wilke the Marcan hypothesis had not
+implied this result, because they continued to combine with it the wider
+hypothesis of a general tradition, holding that Matthew and Luke used the
+collection of "Logia," and also owed part of their supplementary matter to
+a free use of floating tradition, so that Mark, it might almost be said,
+merely supplied them with the formative principle by means of which they
+might order their material.
+
+But what if Papias's statement about the collection of "Logia" were
+worthless, and could be shown to be so by the literary data? In that case
+Matthew and Luke would be purely literary expansions of Mark, and like
+him, purely literary inventions.
+
+In this connexion Bauer attaches decisive importance to the phenomena of
+the birth-stories. If these had been derived from tradition they could not
+differ from each other as they do. If it is suggested that tradition had
+produced a large number of independent, though mutually consistent,
+stories of the childhood, out of which the Evangelists composed their
+opening narratives, this also is found to be untenable, for these
+narratives are not composite structures. The separate stories of which
+each of these two histories of the childhood consists could not have been
+formed independently of one another; none of them existed by itself; each
+points to the others and is informed by a view which implies the whole.
+The histories of the childhood are therefore not literary versions of a
+tradition, but literary inventions.
+
+If we go on to examine the discourse and narrative material, additional to
+that of Mark, which is found in Matthew and Luke, a similar result
+appears. The same standpoint is regulative throughout, showing that the
+additions do not consist of oral or written traditional material which has
+been worked into the Marcan plan, but of a literary development of certain
+fundamental ideas and suggestions found in the first author. These
+developments, as is shown by the accounts of the Sermon on the Mount and
+the charge to the Twelve, are not carried as far in Luke as in Matthew.
+The additional material in the latter seems indeed to be worked up from
+suggestions in the former. Luke thus forms the transition stage between
+Mark and Matthew. The Marcan hypothesis, accordingly, now takes on the
+following form. Our knowledge of the Gospel history does not rest upon any
+basis of tradition, but only upon three literary works. Two of these are
+not independent, being merely expansions of the first, and the third,
+Matthew, is also dependent upon the second. Consequently there is no
+tradition of the Gospel history, but only a single _literary source_.
+
+But, if so, who is to assure us that this Gospel history, with its
+assertion of the Messiahship of Jesus, was already a matter of common
+knowledge before it was fixed in writing, and did not first become known
+in a literary form? In the latter case, one man would have created out of
+general ideas the definite historical tradition in which these ideas are
+embodied. The only thing that could be set against this literary
+possibility, as a historical counter-possibility, would be a proof that at
+the period when the Gospel history is supposed to take place a Messianic
+expectation really existed among the Jews, so that a man who claimed to be
+the Messiah and was recognised as such, as Mark represents Jesus to have
+been, would be historically conceivable. This presupposition had hitherto
+been unanimously accepted by all writers, no matter how much opposed in
+other respects. They were all satisfied "that before the appearance of
+Jesus the expectation of a Messiah prevailed among the Jews"; and were
+even able to explain its precise character.
+
+But where--apart from the Gospels--did they get their information from?
+Where is the documentary evidence of the Jewish Messianic doctrine on
+which that of the Gospels is supposed to be based? Daniel was the last of
+the prophets. Everything tends to suggest that the mysterious content of
+his work remained without influence in the subsequent period. Jewish
+literature ends with the Wisdom writings, in which there is no mention of
+a Messiah. In the LXX there is no attempt to translate in accordance with
+a preconceived picture of the Messiah. In the Apocalypses, which are of
+small importance, there is reference to a Messianic Kingdom; the Messiah
+Himself, however, plays a quite subordinate part, and is, indeed, scarcely
+mentioned. For Philo He has no existence; the Alexandrian does not dream
+of connecting Him with his Logos speculation. There remain, therefore, as
+witnesses for the Jewish Messianic expectations in the time of Tiberius,
+only Mark and his imitators. This evidence, however, is of such a
+character that in certain points it contradicts itself.
+
+In the first place, if at the time when the Christian community was
+forming its view of history and the religious ideas which we find in the
+Gospels, the Jews had already possessed a doctrine of the Messiah, there
+would have been already a fixed type of interpretation of the Messianic
+passages in the Old Testament, and it would have been impossible for the
+same passages to be interpreted in a totally different way, as referring
+to Jesus and His work, as we find them interpreted in the New Testament.
+Next, consider the representation of the Baptist's work. We should have
+expected him to connect his baptism with the preaching of "Him who was to
+come"--if this were really the Messiah--by baptizing in the name of this
+"Coming One." He, however, keeps them separate, baptizing in preparation
+for the Kingdom, though referring in his discourses to "Him who was to
+come."
+
+The earliest Evangelist did not venture openly to carry back into the
+history the idea that Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, because he was
+aware that in the time of Jesus no general expectation of the Messiah had
+prevailed among the people. When the disciples in Mark viii. 28 report the
+opinions of the people concerning Jesus they cannot mention any who hold
+Him to be the Messiah. Peter is the first to attain to the recognition of
+His Messiahship. But as soon as the confession is made the Evangelist
+makes Jesus forbid His disciples to tell the people who He is. Why is the
+attribution of the Messiahship to Jesus made in this surreptitious and
+inconsistent way? It is because the writer who gave the history its form
+well knew that no one had ever come forward publicly on Palestinian soil
+to claim the Messiahship, or had been recognised by the people as Messiah.
+
+The "reflective conception of the Messiah" was not, therefore, taken over
+ready-made from Judaism; that dogma first arose along with the Christian
+community, or rather the moment in which it arose was the same in which
+the Christian community had its birth.
+
+Moreover, how unhistorical, even on a priori grounds, is the mechanical
+way in which Jesus at this first appearance at once sets Himself up as the
+Messiah and says, "Behold I am He whom ye have expected." In essence,
+Bauer thinks, there is not so much difference between Strauss and
+Hengstenberg. For Hengstenberg the whole life of Jesus is the living
+embodiment of the Old Testament picture of the Messiah; Strauss, a less
+reverent counterpart of Hengstenberg, made the image of the Messiah into a
+mask which Jesus Himself was obliged to assume, and which legend
+afterwards substituted for His real features.
+
+"We save the honour of Jesus," says Bauer, "when we restore His Person to
+life from the state of inanition to which the apologists have reduced it,
+and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly
+possessed--that can no longer be denied. If a conception was to become
+dominant which should unite heaven and earth, God and man, nothing more
+and nothing less was necessary as a preliminary condition, than that a Man
+should appear, the very essence of whose consciousness should be the
+reconciliation of these antitheses, and who should manifest this
+consciousness to the world, and lead the religious mind to the sole point
+from which its difficulties can be solved. Jesus accomplished this mighty
+work, but not by prematurely pointing to His own Person. Instead He
+gradually made known to the people the thoughts which filled and entered
+into the very essence of His mind. It was only in this indirect way that
+His Person--which He freely offered up in the cause of His historical
+vocation and of the idea for which He lived--continued to live on in so far
+as this idea was accepted. When, in the belief of His followers, He rose
+again and lived on in the Christian community, it was as the Son of God
+who had overcome and reconciled the great antithesis. He was that in which
+alone the religious consciousness found rest and peace, apart from which
+there was nothing firm, trustworthy, and enduring."
+
+"It was only now that the vague, ill-defined, prophetic representations
+were focused into a point; were not only fulfilled, but were also united
+together by a common bond which strengthened and gave greater value to
+each of them. With His appearance and the rise of belief in Him, a clear
+conception, a definite mental picture of the Messiah became possible; and
+thus it was that a Christology(92) first arose."
+
+While, therefore, at the close of Bauer's first work it might have seemed
+that it was only the Gospel of John which he held to be a literary
+creation, here the same thing is said of the original Gospel. The only
+difference is that we find more primitive reflection in the Synoptics, and
+later work in the representation given by the Fourth Evangelist; the
+former is of a more practical character, the latter more dogmatic.
+
+Nevertheless it is false to assert that according to Bauer the earliest
+Evangelist invented the Gospel history and the personality of Jesus. That
+is to carry back the ideas of a later period and a further stage of
+development into the original form of his view. At the moment when, having
+disposed of preliminaries, he enters on his investigation, he still
+assumes that a great, a unique Personality, who so impressed men by His
+character that it lived on among them in an ideal form, had awakened into
+life the Messianic idea; and that what the original Evangelist really did
+was to portray the life of this Jesus--the Christ of the community which He
+founded--in accordance with the Messianic view of Him, just as the Fourth
+Evangelist portrayed it in accordance with the presupposition that Jesus
+was the revealer of the Logos. It was only in the course of his
+investigations that Bauer's opinion became more radical. As he goes on,
+his writing becomes ill-tempered, and takes the form of controversial
+dialogues with "the theologians," whom he apostrophises in a biting and
+injurious fashion, and whom he continually reproaches with not daring,
+owing to their apologetic prejudices, to see things as they really are,
+and with declining to face the ultimate results of criticism from fear
+that the tradition might suffer more loss of historic value than religion
+could bear. In spite of this hatred of the theologians, which is
+pathological in character, like his meaningless punctuation, his critical
+analyses are always exceedingly acute. One has the impression of walking
+alongside a man who is reasoning quite intelligently, but who talks to
+himself as though possessed by a fixed idea. What if the whole thing
+should turn out to be nothing but a literary invention--not only the
+incidents and discourses, but even the Personality which is assumed as the
+starting-point of the whole movement? What if the Gospel history were only
+a late imaginary embodiment of a set of exalted ideas, and these were the
+only historical reality from first to last? This is the idea which
+obsesses his mind more and more completely, and moves him to contemptuous
+laughter. What, he mocks, will these apologists, who are so sure of
+everything, do then with the shreds and tatters which will be all that is
+left to them?
+
+But at the outset of his investigations Bauer was far from holding such
+views. His purpose was really only to continue the work of Strauss. The
+conception of myth and legend of which the latter made use is, Bauer
+thinks, much too vague to explain this deliberate "transformation" of a
+personality. In the place of myth Bauer therefore sets "reflection." The
+life which pulses in the Gospel history is too vigorous to be explained as
+created by legend; it is real "experience," only not the experience of
+Jesus, but of the Church. The representation of this experience of the
+Church in the Life of a Person is not the work of a number of persons, but
+of a single author. It is in this twofold aspect--as the composition of one
+man, embodying the experience of many--that the Gospel history is to be
+regarded. As religious art it has a profound truth. When it is regarded
+from this point of view the difficulties which are encountered in the
+endeavour to conceive it as real immediately disappear.
+
+We must take as our point of departure the belief in the sacrificial death
+and the resurrection of Jesus. Everything else attaches itself to this as
+to its centre. When the need arose to fix definitely the beginning of the
+manifestation of Jesus as the Saviour--to determine the point of time at
+which the Lord issued forth from obscurity--it was natural to connect this
+with the work of the Baptist; and Jesus comes to his baptism. While this
+is sufficient for the earliest Evangelist, Matthew and Luke feel it to be
+necessary, in view of the important consequences involved in the connexion
+of Jesus with the Baptist, to bring them into relation once more by means
+of the question addressed by the Baptist to Jesus, although this addition
+is quite inconsistent with the assumptions of the earliest Evangelist. If
+he had conceived the story of the baptism with the idea of introducing the
+Baptist again on a later occasion, and this time, moreover, as a doubter,
+he would have given it a different form. This is a just observation of
+Bauer's; the story of the baptism with the miracle which took place at it,
+and the Baptist's question, understood as implying a doubt of the
+Messiahship of Jesus, mutually exclude one another.
+
+The story of the temptation embodies an experience of the early Church.
+This narrative represents her inner conflicts under the form of a conflict
+of the Redeemer. On her march through the wilderness of this world she has
+to fight with temptations of the devil, and in the story composed by Mark
+and Luke, and artistically finished by Matthew, she records a vow to build
+only on the inner strength of her constitutive principle. In the sermon on
+the mount also, Matthew has carried out with greater completeness that
+which was more vaguely conceived by Luke. It is only when we understand
+the words of Jesus as embodying experiences of the early Church that their
+deeper sense becomes clear and what would otherwise seem offensive
+disappears. The saying, "Let the dead bury their dead," would not have
+been fitting for Jesus to speak, and had He been a real man, it could
+never have entered into His mind to create so unreal and cruel a collision
+of duties; for no command, Divine or human, could have sufficed to make it
+right for a man to contravene the ethical obligations of family life. So
+here again, the obvious conclusion is that the saying originated in the
+early Church, and was intended to inculcate renunciation of a world which
+was felt to belong to the kingdom of the dead, and to illustrate this by
+an extreme example.
+
+The mission of the Twelve, too, is, as an historical occurrence, simply
+inconceivable. It would have been different if Jesus had given them a
+definite teaching, or form of belief, or positive conception of any kind,
+to take with them as their message. But how ill the charge to the Twelve
+fulfils its purpose as a discourse of instruction! What the disciples
+needed to learn, namely, what and how they were to teach, they are not
+told; and the discourse which Matthew has composed, working on the basis
+of Luke, implies quite a different set of circumstances. It is concerned
+with the struggles of the Church with the world and the sufferings which
+it must endure. This is the explanation of the references to suffering
+which constantly recur in the discourses of Jesus, in spite of the fact
+that His disciples were not enduring any sufferings, and that the
+Evangelist cannot even make it conceivable as a possibility that those
+before whose eyes Jesus holds up the way of the Cross could ever come into
+such a position. The Twelve, at any rate, had no sufferings to encounter
+during their mission, and if they were merely being sent by Jesus into the
+surrounding districts they were not very likely to meet with kings and
+rulers there.
+
+That it is a case of invented history is also shown by the fact that
+nothing is said about the doings of the disciples, and they seem to come
+back again immediately, though the earliest Evangelist, it is true, to
+prevent this from being too apparent, inserts at this point the story of
+the execution of the Baptist.
+
+All this is just and acute criticism. The charge to the Twelve is not a
+discourse of instruction. What Jesus there sets before the disciples they
+could not at that time have understood, and the promises which He makes to
+them are not appropriate to their circumstances.
+
+Many of the discourses are mere bundles of heterogeneous sayings, though
+this is not so much the case in Mark as in the others. He has not
+forgotten that effective polemic consists of short, pointed, incisive
+arguments. The others, as advanced theologians, are of opinion that it is
+fitting to indulge in arguments which have nothing to do with the matter
+in hand, or only the most distant connexion with it. They form the
+transition to the discourses of the Fourth Gospel, which usually
+degenerate into an aimless wrangle. In the same connexion it is rightly
+observed that the discourses of Jesus do not advance from point to point
+by the logical development of an idea, the thoughts are merely strung
+together one after another, the only connexion, if connexion there is,
+being due to a kind of conventional mould in which the discourse is cast.
+
+The parables, Bauer continues, present difficulties no less great. It is
+an ineptitude on the part of the apologists to suggest that the parables
+are intended to make things clear. Jesus Himself contradicts this view by
+saying bluntly and unambiguously to His disciples that to them it was
+given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to the people all
+His teaching must be spoken as parables, that "seeing they might see and
+not perceive, and hearing they might hear and not understand." The
+parables were therefore intended only to exercise the intelligence of the
+disciples; and so far from being understood by the people, mystified and
+repelled them; as if it would not have been much better to exercise the
+minds of the disciples in this way when He was alone with them. The
+disciples, however, do not even understand the simple parable of the
+Sower, but need to have it interpreted to them, so that the Evangelist
+once more stultifies his own theory.
+
+Bruno Bauer is right in his observation that the parables offer a serious
+problem, seeing that they were intended to conceal and not to make plain,
+and that Jesus nevertheless taught only in parables. The character of the
+difficulty, however, is such that even literary criticism has no
+explanation ready. Bruno Bauer admits that he does not know what was in
+the mind of the Evangelist when he composed these parables, and thinks
+that he had no very definite purpose, or at least that the suggestions
+which were floating in his mind were not worked up into a clearly ordered
+whole.
+
+Here, therefore, Bauer's method broke down. He did not, however, allow
+this to shake his confidence in his reading of the facts, and he continued
+to maintain it in the face of a new difficulty which he himself brought
+clearly to light. Mark, according to him, is an artistic unity, the
+offspring of a single mind. How then is it to be explained that in
+addition to other less important doublets it contains two accounts of the
+feeding of the multitude? Here Bauer has recourse to the aid of Wilke, who
+distinguishes our Mark from an Ur-Markus,(93) and ascribes these doublets
+to later interpolation. Later on he became more and more doubtful about
+the artistic unity of Mark, despite the fact that this was the fundamental
+assumption of his theory, and in the second edition of his "Criticism of
+the Gospels," of 1851, he carried through the distinction between the
+canonical Mark and the Ur-Markus.
+
+But even supposing the assumption of a redaction were justified, how could
+the redactor have conceived the idea of adding to the first account of the
+feeding of the multitude a second which is identical with it almost to the
+very wording? In any case, on what principle can Mark be distinguished
+from Ur-Markus? There are no fundamental differences to afford a ready
+criterion. The distinction is purely one of subjective feeling, that is to
+say, it is arbitrary. As soon as Bauer admits that the artistic unity of
+Mark, on which he lays so much stress, has been tampered with, he cannot
+maintain his position except by shutting his eyes to the fact that it can
+only be a question of the weaving in of fragments of tradition, not of the
+inventions of an imitator. But if he once admits the presence of
+traditional materials, his whole theory of the earliest Evangelist's
+having created the Gospel falls to the ground.
+
+For the moment he succeeds in laying the spectre again, and continues to
+think of Mark as a work of art, in which the interpolation alters nothing.
+
+Bauer discusses with great thoroughness those sayings of Jesus in which He
+forbids those whom He had healed to noise abroad their cure. In the form
+in which they appear these cannot, he argues, be historical, for Jesus
+imposes this prohibition in some cases where it is quite meaningless,
+since the healing had taken place in the presence of a multitude. It must
+therefore be derived from the Evangelist. Only when it is recognised as a
+free creation can its meaning be discerned. It finds its explanation in
+the inconsistent views regarding miracle which were held side by side in
+the early Church. No doubt was felt that Jesus had performed miracles, and
+by these miracles had given evidence of His Divine mission. On the other
+hand, by the introduction of the Christian principle, the Jewish demand
+for a sign had been so far limited, and the other, the spiritual line of
+evidence, had become so important, or at least so indispensable, that it
+was no longer possible to build on the miracles only, or to regard Jesus
+merely as a wonder-worker; so in some way or other the importance ascribed
+to miracle must be reduced. In the graphic symbolism of the Gospel history
+this antithesis takes the form that Jesus did miracles--there was no
+getting away from that--but on the other hand Himself declared that He did
+not wish to lay any stress upon such acts. As there are times when
+miracles must hide their light under a bushel, Jesus, on occasion, forbids
+that they should be made known. The other Synoptists no longer understood
+this theory of the first Evangelist, and introduced the prohibition in
+passages where it was absurd.
+
+The way in which Jesus makes known His Messiahship is based on another
+theory of the original Evangelist. The order of Mark can give us no
+information regarding the chronology of the life of Jesus, since this
+Gospel is anything rather than a chronicle. We cannot even assert that
+there is a deliberate logic in the way in which the sections are
+connected. But there is one fundamental principle of arrangement which
+comes quite clearly to light, viz. that it was only at Caesarea Philippi,
+in the closing period of His life, that Jesus made Himself known as the
+Messiah, and that, therefore, He was not previously held to be so either
+by His disciples or by the people. This is clearly shown in the answers of
+the disciples when Jesus asked them whom men took Him to be. The implied
+course of events, however, is determined by art, not history--as history it
+would be inconceivable.
+
+Could there indeed be a more absurd impossibility? "Jesus," says Bauer,
+"must perform these innumerable, these astounding miracles because,
+according to the view which the Gospels represent, He is the Messiah; He
+must perform them in order to prove Himself to be the Messiah--and yet no
+one recognises Him as the Messiah! That is the greatest miracle of all,
+that the people had not long ago recognised the Messiah in this wonder-
+worker. Jesus could only be held to be the Messiah in consequence of doing
+miracles; but He only began to do miracles when, in the faith of the early
+Church, He rose from the dead as Messiah, and the facts that He rose as
+Messiah and that He did miracles, are one and the same fact."
+
+Mark, however, represents a Jesus who does miracles and who nevertheless
+does not thereby reveal Himself to be the Messiah. He was obliged so to
+represent Him, because he was conscious that Jesus was not recognised and
+acknowledged as Messiah by the people, nor even by His immediate
+followers, in the unhesitating fashion in which those of later times
+imagined Him to have been recognised. Mark's conception and representation
+of the matter carried back into the past the later developments by which
+there finally arose a Christian community for which Jesus had become the
+Messiah. "Mark is also influenced by an artistic instinct which leads him
+to develop the main interest, the origin of the faith, gradually. It is
+only after the ministry of Jesus has extended over a considerable period,
+and is, indeed, drawing towards its close, that faith arises in the circle
+of the disciples; and it is only later still, when, in the person of the
+blind man at Jericho, a prototype of the great company of believers that
+was to be has hailed the Lord with a Messianic salutation, that, at the
+triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the faith of the people suddenly ripens
+and finds expression."
+
+It is true, this artistic design is completely marred when Jesus does
+miracles which must have made Him known to every child as the Messiah. We
+cannot, therefore, blame Matthew very much if, while he retains this plan
+in its external outlines in a kind of mechanical way, he contradicts it
+somewhat awkwardly by making Jesus at an earlier point clearly designate
+Himself as Messiah and many recognise Him as such. And the Fourth
+Evangelist cannot be said to be destroying any very wonderful work of art
+when he gives the impression that from the very first any one who wished
+could recognise Jesus as the Messiah.
+
+Mark himself does not keep strictly to his own plan. He makes Jesus forbid
+His disciples to make known His Messiahship; how then does the multitude
+at Jerusalem recognise it so suddenly, after a single miracle which they
+had not even witnessed, and which was in no way different from others
+which He had done before? If that "chance multitude" in Jerusalem was
+capable of such sudden enlightenment it must have fallen from heaven!
+
+The following remarks of Bauer, too, are nothing less than classical. The
+incident at Caesarea Philippi is the central fact of the Gospel history;
+it gives us a fixed point from which to group and criticise the other
+statements of the Gospel. At the same time it introduces a complication
+into the plan of the life of Jesus, because it necessitates the carrying
+through of the theory--often in the face of the text--that previously Jesus
+had never been regarded as the Messiah; and lays upon us the necessity of
+showing not only how Peter had come to recognise His Messiahship, but also
+how He subsequently became Messiah for the multitude--if indeed He ever did
+become Messiah for them. But the very fact that it does introduce this
+complication is in itself a proof that in this scene at Caesarea Philippi
+we have the one ray of light which history sheds upon the life of Jesus.
+It is impossible to explain how any one could come to reject the simple
+and natural idea that Jesus claimed from the first to be the Messiah, if
+that had been the fact, and accept this complicated representation in its
+place. The latter, therefore, must be the original version. In pointing
+this out, Bauer gave for the first time the real proof, from internal
+evidence, of the priority of Mark.
+
+The difficulty involved in the conception of miracle as a proof of the
+Messiahship of Jesus is another discovery of Bauer's. Only here, instead
+of probing the question to the bottom, he stops half-way. How do we know,
+he should have gone on to ask, that the Messiah was expected to appear as
+an earthly wonder-worker? There is nothing to that effect in Jewish
+writings. And do not the Gospels themselves prove that any one might do
+miracles without suggesting to a single person the idea that he might be
+the Messiah? Accordingly the only inference to be drawn from the Marcan
+representation is that miracles were not among the characteristic marks of
+the Messiah, and that it was only later, in the Christian community, which
+made Jesus the miracle-worker into Jesus the Messiah, that this connexion
+between miracles and Messiahship was established. In dealing with the
+question of the triumphal entry, too, Bauer halts half-way. Where do we
+read that Jesus was hailed as Messiah upon that occasion? If He had been
+taken by the people to be the Messiah, the controversy in Jerusalem must
+have turned on this personal question; but it did not even touch upon it,
+and the Sanhedrin never thinks of setting up witnesses to Jesus' claim to
+be the Messiah. When once Bauer had exposed the historical and literary
+impossibility of Jesus' being hailed by the people as Messiah, he ought to
+have gone on to draw the conclusion that Jesus did not, according to Mark,
+make a Messianic entry into Jerusalem.
+
+It was, however, a remarkable achievement on Bauer's part to have thus set
+forth clearly the historical difficulties of the life of Jesus. One might
+suppose that between the work of Strauss and that of Bauer there lay not
+five, but fifty years--the critical work of a whole generation.
+
+The stereotyped character of the thrice-repeated prediction of the
+passion, which, according to Bauer, betrays a certain poverty and
+feebleness of imagination on the part of the earliest Evangelist, shows
+clearly, he thinks, the unhistorical character of the utterance recorded.
+The fact that the prediction occurs three times, its definiteness
+increasing upon each occasion, proves its literary origin.
+
+It is the same with the transfiguration. The group in which the heroic
+representatives of the Law and the Prophets stand as supporters of the
+Saviour, was modelled by the earliest Evangelist. In order to place it in
+the proper light and to give becoming splendour to its great subject, he
+has introduced a number of traits taken from the story of Moses.
+
+Bauer pitilessly exposes the difficulties of the journey of Jesus from
+Galilee to Jerusalem, and exults over the perplexities of the
+"apologists." "The theologian," he says, "must not boggle at this journey,
+he must just believe it. He must in faith follow the footsteps of his
+Lord! Through the midst of Galilee and Samaria--and at the same time, for
+Matthew also claims a hearing, through Judaea on the farther side of
+Jordan! I wish him _Bon voyage_!"
+
+The eschatological discourses are not history, but are merely an expansion
+of those explanations of the sufferings of the Church of which we have had
+a previous example in the charge to the Twelve. An Evangelist who wrote
+before the destruction of Jerusalem would have referred to the Temple, to
+Jerusalem, and to the Jewish people, in a very different way.
+
+The story of Lazarus deserves special attention. Did not Spinoza say that
+he would break his system in pieces if he could be convinced of the
+reality of this event? This is the decisive point for the question of the
+relation between the Synoptists and John. Vain are all the efforts of the
+apologists to explain why the Synoptists do not mention this miracle. The
+reason they ignore it is that it originated after their time in the mind
+of the Fourth Evangelist, and they were unacquainted with his Gospel. And
+yet it is the most valuable of all, because it shows clearly the
+concentric circles of progressive intensification by which the development
+of the Gospel history proceeds. "The Fourth Gospel," remarks Bauer,
+"represents a dead man as having been restored to life after having been
+four days under the power of death, and having consequently become a prey
+to corruption; Luke represents the young man at Nain as being restored to
+life when his body was being carried to the grave; Mark, the earliest
+Evangelist, can only tell us of the restoration of a dead person who had
+the moment before succumbed to an illness. The theologians have a great
+deal to say about the contrast between the canonical and the apocryphal
+writings, but they might have found a similar contrast even within the
+four Gospels, if the light had not been so directly in their eyes."
+
+The treachery of Judas, as described in the Gospels, is inexplicable.
+
+The Lord's Supper, considered as an historic scene, is revolting and
+inconceivable. Jesus can no more have instituted it than He can have
+uttered the saying, "Let the dead bury their dead." In both cases the
+objectionableness arises from the fact that a tenet of the early Church
+has been cast into the form of an historical saying of Jesus. A man who
+was present in person, corporeally present, could not entertain the idea
+of offering others his flesh and blood to eat. To demand from others that
+they should, while he was actually present, imagine the bread and wine
+which they were eating to be his body and blood, would be for an actual
+man wholly impossible. It was only when Jesus' actual bodily presence had
+been removed, and only when the Christian community had existed for some
+time, that such a conception as is expressed in that formula could have
+arisen. A point which clearly betrays the later composition of the
+narrative is that the Lord does not turn to the disciples sitting with Him
+at table and say, "This is my blood which is shed for you," but, since the
+words were invented by the early Church, speaks of the "many" for whom He
+gives Himself. The only historical fact is that the Jewish Passover was
+gradually transformed by the Christian community into a feast which had
+reference to Jesus.
+
+As regards the scene in Gethsemane, Mark, according to Bauer, held it
+necessary that in the moment when the last conflict and final catastrophe
+were coming upon Jesus, He should show clearly by His actions that He met
+this fate of His own free will. The reality of His choice could only be
+made clear by showing Him first engaged in an inner struggle against the
+acceptance of His vocation, before showing how He freely submitted to His
+fate.
+
+The last words ascribed to Jesus by Mark, "My God, my God, why hast Thou
+forsaken me?" were written without thinking of the inferences that might
+be drawn from them, merely with the purpose of showing that even to the
+last moment of His passion Jesus fulfilled the role of the Messiah, the
+picture of whose sufferings had been revealed to the Psalmist so long
+beforehand by the Holy Spirit.
+
+It is scarcely necessary now, Bauer thinks, to go into the contradictions
+in the story of the resurrection, for "the doughty Reimarus, with his
+thorough-going honesty, has already fully exposed them, and no one has
+refuted him."
+
+The results of Bauer's analysis may be summed up as follows:--
+
+The Fourth Evangelist has betrayed the secret of the original Gospel,
+namely, that it too can be explained on purely literary grounds. Mark has
+"loosed us from the theological lie." "Thanks to the kindly fate," cries
+Bauer, "which has preserved to us this writing of Mark by which we have
+been delivered from the web of deceit of this hellish pseudo-science!"
+
+In order to tear this web of falsehood the critic and historian must,
+despite his repugnance, once more take up the pretended arguments of the
+theologians in favour of the historicity of the Gospel narratives and set
+them on their feet, only to knock them down again. In the end Bauer's only
+feeling towards the theologians was one of contempt. "The expression of
+his contempt," he declares, "is the last weapon which the critic, after
+refuting the arguments of the theologians, has at his disposal for their
+discomfiture; it is his right to use it; that puts the finishing touch
+upon his task and points forward to the happy time when the arguments of
+the theologians shall no more be heard of."
+
+These outbreaks of bitterness are to be explained by the feeling of
+repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in every genuinely
+honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it adopted in opposing
+Strauss. Hence the fiendish joy with which he snatches away the crutches
+of this pseudo-science, hurls them to a distance, and makes merry over its
+helplessness. A furious hatred, a fierce desire to strip the theologians
+absolutely bare, carried Bauer much farther than his critical acumen would
+have led him in cold blood.
+
+Bauer hated the theologians for still holding fast to the barbarous
+conception that a great man had forced himself into a stereotyped and
+unspiritual system, and in that way had set in motion great ideas, whereas
+he held that that would have signified the death of both the personality
+and the ideas; but this hatred is only the surface symptom of another
+hatred, which goes deeper than theology, going down, indeed, to the very
+depths of the Christian conception of the world. Bruno Bauer hates not
+only the theologians, but Christianity, and hates it because it expresses
+a truth in a wrong way. It is a religion which has become petrified in a
+transitional form. A religion which ought to have led on to the true
+religion has usurped the place of the true religion, and in this petrified
+form it holds prisoner all the real forces of religion.
+
+Religion is the victory over the world of the self-conscious ego. It is
+only when the ego grasps itself in its antithesis to the world as a whole,
+and is no longer content to play the part of a mere "walking gentleman" in
+the world-drama, but faces the world with independence and reserve, that
+the necessary conditions of universal religion are present. These
+conditions came into being with the rise of the Roman Empire, in which the
+individual suddenly found himself helpless and unarmed in face of a world
+in which he could no longer find free play for his activities, but must
+stand prepared at any moment to be ground to powder by it.
+
+The self-conscious ego, recognising this position, found itself faced by
+the necessity of breaking loose from the world and standing alone, in
+order in this way to overcome the world. Victory over the world by
+alienation from the world--these were the ideas out of which Christianity
+was born. But it was not the true victory over the world; Christianity
+remained at the stage of violent opposition to the world.
+
+Miracle, to which the Christian religion has always appealed, and to which
+it gives a quite fundamental importance, is the appropriate symbol of this
+false victory over the world. There are some wonderfully deep thoughts
+scattered through Bauer's critical investigations. "Man's realisation of
+his personality," he says, "is the death of Nature, but in the sense that
+he can only bring about this death by the knowledge of Nature and its
+laws, that is to say from within, being himself essentially the
+annihilation and negation of Nature.... Spirit honours and recognises the
+worth of the very thing which it negates.... Spirit does not fume and
+bluster, and rage and rave against Nature, as it is supposed to do in
+miracle, for that would be the denial of its inner law, but quietly works
+its way through the antithesis. In short the death of Nature implied in
+the conscious realisation of personality is the resurrection of Nature in
+a nobler form, not the maltreatment, mockery, and insult to which it would
+be exposed by miracle." Not only miracle, however, but the portrait of
+Jesus Christ as drawn in the Gospels, is a stereotyping of that false idea
+of victory over the world. The Christ of the Gospel history, thought of as
+a really historic figure, would be a figure at which humanity would
+shudder, a figure which could only inspire dismay and horror. The
+historical Jesus, if He really existed, can only have been One who
+reconciled in His own consciousness the antithesis which obsessed the
+Jewish mind, namely the separation between God and Man; He cannot in the
+process of removing this antithesis have called into existence a new
+principle of religious division and alienation; nor can He have shown the
+way of escape, by the principle of inwardness, from the bondage of the Law
+only to impose a new set of legal fetters.
+
+The Christ of the Gospel history, on the other hand, is Man exalted by the
+religious consciousness to heaven, who, even if He comes down to earth to
+do miracles, to teach, and to suffer, is no longer true man. The Son of
+Man of religion, even though His mission be to reconcile, is man as
+alienated from himself. This Christ of the Gospel history, the ego exalted
+to heaven and become God, overthrew antiquity, and conquered the world in
+the sense that He exhausted it of all its vitality. This magnified ego
+would have fulfilled its historical vocation if, by means of the terrible
+disorganisation into which it threw the real spirit of mankind, it had
+compelled the latter to come to a knowledge of itself, to become self-
+conscious with a thoroughness and decisiveness which had not been possible
+to the simple spirit of antiquity. It was disastrous that the figure which
+stood for the first emancipation of the ego, remained alive. That
+transformation of the human spirit which was brought about by the
+encounter of the world-power of Rome with philosophy was represented by
+the Gospels, under the influence of the Old Testament, as realised in a
+single historic Personality; and the strength of the spirit of mankind was
+swallowed up by the omnipotence of the pure absolute ego, an ego which was
+alien from actual humanity. The self-consciousness of humanity finds
+itself reflected in the Gospels, a self, indeed, in alienation from
+itself, and therefore a grotesque parody of itself, but, after all, in
+some sense, itself; hence the magical charm which attracted mankind and
+enchained it, and, so long as it had not truly found itself, urged it to
+sacrifice everything to grasp the image of itself, to prefer it to all
+other and all else, counting all, as the apostle says, but "dung" in
+comparison with it.
+
+Even when the Roman world was no more, and a new world had come into
+being, the Christ so created did not die. The magic of His enchantment
+became only more terrible, and as new strength came flooding into the old
+world, the time arrived when it was to accomplish its greatest work of
+destruction. Spirit, in its abstraction, became a vampire, the destroyer
+of the world. Sap and strength, blood and life, it sucked, to the last
+drop, out of humanity. Nature and art, family, nation, state, all were
+destroyed by it; and in the ruins of the fallen world the ego, exhausted
+by its efforts, remained the only surviving power.
+
+Having made a desert all about it, the ego could not immediately create
+anew, out of the depths of its inner consciousness, nature and art, nation
+and state; the awful process which now went on, the only activity of which
+it was now capable, was the absorption into itself of all that had
+hitherto had life in the world. The ego was now everything; and yet it was
+a void. It had become the universal power, and yet as it brooded over the
+ruins of the world it was filled with horror at itself and with despair at
+all that it had lost. The ego which had devoured all things and was still
+a void now shuddered at itself.
+
+Under the oppression of this awful power the education of mankind has been
+going on; under this grim task-master it has been preparing for true
+freedom, preparing to rouse itself from the depths of its distress, to
+escape from its opposition to itself and cast out that alien ego which is
+wasting its substance. Odysseus has now returned to his home, not by
+favour of the gods, not laid on the shore in sleep, but awake, by his own
+thought and his own strength. Perchance, as of yore, he will have need to
+fight with the suitors who have devoured his substance and sought to rob
+him of all he holds most dear. Odysseus must string the bow once more.
+
+The baleful charm of the self-alienated ego is broken the moment any one
+proves to the religious sense of mankind that the Jesus Christ of the
+Gospels is its creation and ceases to exist as soon as this is recognised.
+The formation of the Church and the arising of the idea that the Jesus of
+the Gospels is the Messiah are not two different things, they are one and
+the same thing, they coincide and synchronise; but the idea was only the
+imaginative conception of the Church, the first movement of its life, the
+religious expression of its experience.
+
+The question which has so much exercised the minds of men--whether Jesus
+was the historic Christ (= Messiah)--is answered in the sense that
+everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him,
+everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that
+is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has
+nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world.
+
+The world is now free, and ripe for a higher religion in which the ego
+will overcome nature, not by self-alienation, but by penetrating it and
+ennobling it. To the theologian we may fling as a gift the shreds of his
+former science, when we have torn it to pieces; that will be something to
+occupy himself with, that time may not hang heavy upon his hands in the
+new world whose advent is steadily drawing nearer.
+
+Thus the task which Bauer had set himself at the beginning of his
+criticism of the Gospel history, turned, before he had finished, into
+something different. When he began, he thought to save the honour of Jesus
+and to restore His Person from the state of inanition to which the
+apologists had reduced it, and hoped by furnishing a proof that the
+historical Jesus could not have been the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, to
+bring Him into a living relation with history. This task, however, was
+given up in favour of the larger one of freeing the world from the
+domination of the Judaeo-Roman idol, Jesus the Messiah, and in carrying
+out this endeavour the thesis that Jesus Christ is a product of the
+imagination of the early Church is formulated in such a way that the
+existence of a historic Jesus becomes problematical, or, at any rate,
+quite indifferent.
+
+At the end of his study of the Gospels, Bauer is inclined to make the
+decision of the question whether there ever was a historic Jesus depend on
+the result of a further investigation which he proposed to make into the
+Pauline Epistles. It was not until ten years later (1850-1851) that he
+accomplished this task,(94) and applied the result in his new edition of
+the "Criticism of the Gospel History."(95) The result is negative: there
+never was any historical Jesus. While criticising the four great Pauline
+Epistles, which the Tuebingen school fondly imagined to be beyond the reach
+of criticism, Bauer shows, however, his inability to lay a positive
+historic foundation for his view of the origin of Christianity. The
+transference of the Epistles to the second century is effected in so
+arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself. However, this work professes
+to be only a preliminary study for a larger one in which the new theory
+was to be fully worked out. This did not appear until 1877; it was
+entitled "Christ and the Caesars; How Christianity originated from Graeco-
+Roman Civilisation."(96) The historical basis for his theory, which he
+here offers, is even more unsatisfactory than that suggested in the
+preliminary work on the Pauline Epistles. There is no longer any pretence
+of following an historical method, the whole thing works out into an
+imaginary picture of the life of Seneca. Nero's tutor had, Bauer thinks,
+already in his inmost consciousness fully attained to inner opposition to
+the world. There are expressions in his works which, in their mystical
+emancipation from the world, prelude the utterances of Paul. The same
+thoughts, since they belong not to Seneca only, but to his time, are found
+also in the works of the three poets of the Neronian period, Persius,
+Lucan, and Petronius. Though they had but a feeble breath of the divine
+afflatus, they are interesting witnesses to the spiritual condition of the
+time. They, too, contributed to the making of Christianity.
+
+But Seneca, in spite of his inner alienation from the world, remained in
+active relations with the world. He desired to found a kingdom of virtue
+upon earth. At the courts of Claudius and Nero he used the arts of
+intrigue to further his ends, and even quietly approved deeds of violence
+which he thought likely to serve his cause. Finally, he grasped at the
+supreme power; and paid the supreme penalty. Stoicism had made an attempt
+to reform the world, and had failed. The great thinkers began to despair
+of exercising any influence upon history, the Senate was powerless, all
+public bodies were deprived of their rights. Then a spirit of resignation
+came over the world. The alienation from the world, which in Seneca had
+still been only half serious, was come in earnest. The time of Nero and
+Domitian was a great epoch in that hidden spiritual history which goes
+silently forward side by side with the noisy outward history of the world.
+When Stoicism, in this development, had been deepened by the introduction
+of neo-Platonic ideas, it was on its way to become the Gospel.
+
+But by itself it would not have given birth to that new thing. It attached
+itself as a formative principle to Judaism, which was then just breaking
+loose from the limitations of nationality. Bauer points to Josephus as a
+type of this new Roman Judaism. This "neo-Roman" lived in the conviction
+that his God, who had withdrawn from His Temple, would take possession of
+the world, and make the Roman Empire submit to His law. Josephus realised
+in his life that for which the way had been spiritually prepared by Philo.
+The latter did not merely effect a fusion of Jewish ideas with Greek
+speculations; he took advantage of the universal dominion established by
+the Romans to found upon it his spiritual world. Bauer had already
+pictured him in this role in his work "Philo, Strauss, and Renan, and
+Primitive Christianity."
+
+Thus was the new religion formed. The spirit of it came from the west, the
+outward frame was furnished by Judaism. The new movement had two foci,
+Rome and Alexandria. Philo's "Therapeutae" were real people; they were the
+forerunners of Christianity. Under Trajan the new religion began to be
+known. Pliny's letter asking for instructions as to how to deal with the
+new movement is its certificate of birth--the original form of the letter,
+it must be understood, not the present form, which has undergone editing
+at the hands of Christians.
+
+The literary process by which the origin of the movement was thrown back
+to an earlier date in history lasted about fifty years.
+
+When this latest work of Bauer's appeared he had long been regarded by
+theologians as an extinct force; nay, more, had been forgotten. And he had
+not even kept his promise. He had not succeeded in showing what that
+higher form of victory over the world was, which he declared superior to
+Christianity; and in place of the personality of Jesus he had finally set
+up a hybrid thing, laboriously compounded out of two personalities of so
+little substance as those of Seneca and Josephus. That was the end of his
+great undertaking.
+
+But it was a mistake to bury, along with the Bauer of the second period,
+also the Bauer of the first period, the critic--for the latter was not
+dead. It was, indeed, nothing less than a misfortune that Strauss and
+Bauer appeared within so short a time of one another. Bauer passed
+practically unnoticed, because every one was preoccupied with Strauss.
+Another unfortunate thing was that Bauer overthrew with his powerful
+criticism the hypothesis which attributed real historical value to Mark,
+so that it lay for a long time disregarded, and there ensued a barren
+period of twenty years in the critical study of the Life of Jesus.
+
+The only critic with whom Bauer can be compared is Reimarus. Each
+exercised a terrifying and disabling influence upon his time. No one else
+had been so keenly conscious as they of the extreme complexity of the
+problem offered by the life of Jesus. In view of this complexity they
+found themselves compelled to seek a solution outside the confines of
+verifiable history. Reimarus, by finding the basis of the story of Jesus
+in a deliberate imposture on the part of the disciples; Bauer, by
+postulating an original Evangelist who invented the history. On this
+ground it was just that they should lose their case. But in dismissing the
+solutions which they offered, their contemporaries also dismissed the
+problems which had necessitated such solutions; they dismissed them
+because they were as little able to grasp as to remove these difficulties.
+
+But the time is past for pronouncing judgment upon Lives of Christ on the
+ground of the solutions which they offer. For us the great men are not
+those who solved the problems, but those who discovered them. Bauer's
+"Criticism of the Gospel History" is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus,
+because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a
+century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of
+the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.
+
+Unfortunately, by the independent, the too loftily independent way in
+which he developed his ideas, he destroyed the possibility of their
+influencing contemporary theology. The shaft which he had driven into the
+mountain broke down behind him, so that it needed the work of a whole
+generation to lay bare once more the veins of ore which he had struck. His
+contemporaries could not suspect that the abnormality of his solutions was
+due to the intensity with which he grasped the problems as problems, and
+that he had become blind to history by examining it too microscopically.
+Thus for his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric.
+
+But his eccentricity concealed a penetrating insight. No one else had as
+yet grasped with the same completeness the idea that primitive
+Christianity and early Christianity were not merely the direct outcome of
+the preaching of Jesus, not merely a teaching put into practice, but more,
+much more, since to the experience of which Jesus was the subject there
+allied itself the experience of the world-soul at a time when its
+body--humanity under the Roman Empire--lay in the throes of death. Since
+Paul, no one had apprehended so powerfully the mystic idea of the super-
+sensible {~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~} {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~}. Bauer transferred it to the historical plane and
+found the "body of Christ" in the Roman Empire.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII. FURTHER IMAGINATIVE LIVES OF JESUS
+
+
+    _Charles Christian Hennell._ Untersuchungen ueber den Ursprung des
+    Christentums. (An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity.)
+    1840. With a preface by David Friedrich Strauss. English edition,
+    1838.
+
+    Wichtige Enthuellungen ueber die wirkliche Todesart Jesu. Nach einem
+    alten zu Alexandria gefundenen Manuskripte von einem Zeitgenossen
+    Jesu aus dem heiligen Orden der Essaeer. (Important Disclosures
+    concerning the Manner of Jesus' Death. From an ancient MS. found
+    at Alexandria, written by a contemporary of Jesus belonging to the
+    sacred Order of the Essenes.) 1849. 5th ed., Leipzig. (Anonymous.)
+
+    Historische Enthuellungen ueber die wirklichen Ereignisse der Geburt
+    und Jugend Jesu. Als Fortsetzung der zu Alexandria aufgefundenen
+    alten Urkunden aus dem Essaeerorden. (Historical Disclosures
+    concerning the real circumstances of the Birth and Youth of Jesus.
+    A Continuation of the ancient Essene MS. discovered at
+    Alexandria.) 1849. 2nd ed., Leipzig.
+
+    _August Friedrich Gfroerer._ Kritische Geschichte des
+    Urchristentums. (Critical History of Primitive Christianity.)
+
+    Vol. i. 1st ed., 1831; 2nd, 1835. Part i. 543 pp.; Part ii. 406
+    pp. Vol. ii. 1838. Part i. 452 pp.; Part ii. 417 pp.
+
+    _Richard von der Alm._ (Pseudonym of _Friedrich Wilhelm
+    Ghillany_.) Theologische Briefe an die Gebildeten der deutschen
+    Nation, 1863. (Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the
+    German People, 1863.) Vol. i. 929 pp.; Vol. ii. 656 pp.; Vol. iii.
+    802 pp.
+
+    _Ludwig Noack._ Die Geschichte Jesu auf Grund freier
+    geschichtlicher Untersuchungen ueber das Evangelium und die
+    Evangelien. (The History of Jesus on the Basis of a free
+    Historical Inquiry regarding the Gospel and the Gospels.) 2nd ed.,
+    1876, Mannheim. Book i. 251 pp.; Book ii. 187 pp.; Book iii. 386
+    pp.; Book iv. 285 pp.
+
+
+Strauss can hardly be said to have done himself honour by contributing a
+preface to the translation of Hennell's work, which is nothing more than
+Venturini's "Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth"
+tricked out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning.(97)
+
+The two series of "Important Disclosures" also are really "conveyed" with
+no particular ability from that classic romance of the Life of Jesus, but
+that did not prevent their making something of a sensation at the time
+when they appeared.(98) Jesus, according to his narrative, was the son of
+a member of the Essene Order. The child was watched over by the Order and
+prepared for His future mission. He entered on His public ministry as a
+tool of the Essenes, who after the crucifixion took Him down from the
+cross and resuscitated Him.
+
+These "Disclosures" only preserve the more external features of
+Venturini's representation. His Life of Jesus had been more than a mere
+romance, it had been an imaginative solution of problems which he had
+intuitively perceived. It may be regarded as the Forerunner of
+rationalistic criticism. The problems which Venturini had intuitively
+perceived were not solved either by the rationalists, or by Strauss, or by
+Weisse. These writers had not succeeded in providing that of which
+Venturini had dreamed--a living purposeful connexion between the events of
+the life of Jesus--or in explaining His Person and Work as having a
+relation, either positive or negative, to the circumstances of Late
+Judaism. Venturini's plan, however fantastic, connects the life of Jesus
+with Jewish history and contemporary thought much more closely than any
+other Life of Jesus, for that connexion is of course vital to the plot of
+the romance. In Weisse's "Gospel History" criticism had deliberately
+renounced the attempt to explain Jesus directly from Judaism, finding
+itself unable to establish any connexion between His teachings and
+contemporary Jewish ideas. The way was therefore once more open to the
+imagination. Accordingly several imaginative Lives preluded a new era in
+the study of the subject, in so far as they endeavoured to understand
+Jesus on the basis of purely Jewish ideas, in some cases as affirming
+these, in others as opposing them in favour of a more spiritual
+conception. In Gfroerer, Richard von der Alm, and Noack, begins the
+skirmishing preparatory to the future battle over eschatology.(99)
+
+August Friedrich Gfroerer, born in 1803 at Calw, was "Repetent" at the
+Tuebingen theological seminary at the time when Strauss was studying there.
+After being curate at the principal church in Stuttgart for a year he gave
+up, in 1830, the clerical profession in order to devote himself wholly to
+his clerical studies.
+
+By that time he had abandoned Christianity. In the preface to the first
+edition of the first volume of his work, he describes Christianity as a
+system which now only maintains itself by the force of custom, after
+having commended itself to antiquity "by the hope of the mystic Kingdom of
+the future world and having ruled the middle ages by the fear of the same
+future." By enunciating this view he has made an end, he thinks, of all
+high-flying Hegelian ideas, and being thus freed from all speculative
+prejudices he feels himself in a position to approach his task from a
+purely historical standpoint, with a view to showing how much of
+Christianity is the creation of one exceptional Personality, and how much
+belongs to the time in which it arose. In the first volume he describes
+how the transformation of Jewish theology in Alexandria reacted upon
+Palestinian theology, and how it came to its climax in Philo. The great
+Alexandrian anticipated, according to Gfroerer, the ideas of Paul. His
+"Therapeutae" are identical with the Essenes. At the same period Judaea
+was kept in a ferment by a series of risings, to all of which the
+incentive was found in Messianic expectations. Then Jesus appeared. The
+three points to be investigated in His history are: what end He had in
+view; why He died; and what modifications His work underwent at the hands
+of the Apostles.
+
+The second volume, entitled "The Sacred Legend," does not, however, carry
+out this plan. The works of Strauss and Weisse necessitated a new method
+of treatment. The fame of Strauss's achievement stirred Gfroerer to
+emulation, and Weisse, with his priority of Mark and rejection of John,
+must be refuted. The work is therefore almost a polemic against Weisse for
+his "want of historic sense," and ends in setting up views which had not
+entered into Gfroerer's mind at the time when he wrote his first volume.
+
+The statements of Papias regarding the Synoptists, which Weisse followed,
+are not deserving of credence. For a whole generation and more the
+tradition about Jesus had passed from mouth to mouth, and it had absorbed
+much that was legendary. Luke was the first--as his preface shows--who
+checked that process, and undertook to separate what was genuine from what
+was not. He is the most trustworthy of the Evangelists, for he keeps
+closely to his sources and adds nothing of his own, in contrast with
+Matthew who, writing at a later date, used sources of less value and
+invented matter of his own, which Gfroerer finds especially in the story of
+the passion in this Gospel. The lateness of Matthew is also evident from
+his tendency to carry over the Old Testament into the New. In Luke, on the
+other hand, the sources are so conscientiously treated that Gfroerer finds
+no difficulty in analysing the narrative into its component parts,
+especially as he always has a purely instinctive feeling "whenever a
+different wind begins to blow."
+
+Both Gospels, however, were written long after the destruction of the holy
+city, since they do not draw their material from the Jerusalem tradition,
+but "from the Christian legends which had grown up in the neighbourhood of
+the Sea of Tiberias," and in consequence "mistakenly transferred the scene
+of Jesus' ministry to Galilee." For this reason it is not surprising "that
+even down into the second century many Christians had doubts about the
+truth of the Synoptics and ventured to express their doubts." Such doubts
+only ceased when the Church became firmly established and began to use its
+authority to suppress the objections of individuals. Mark is the earliest
+witness to doubts within the primitive Christian community regarding the
+credibility of his predecessors. Luke and Matthew are for him not yet
+sacred books; he desires to reconcile their inconsistencies, and at the
+same time to produce "a Gospel composed of materials of which the
+authenticity could be maintained even against the doubters." For this
+reason he omits most of the discourses, ignores the birth-story, and of
+the miracles retains only those which were most deeply embedded in the
+tradition. His Gospel was probably produced between 110 and 120. The "non-
+genuine" conclusion was a later addition, but by the Evangelist himself.
+Thus Mark proves that the Synoptists contain legendary matter even though
+they are separated from the events which they relate only by a generation
+and a half, or at most two generations. To show that there is nothing
+strange in this, Gfroerer gives a long catalogue of miracles found in
+historians who were contemporaries of the events which they describe, and
+in some cases were concerned in them--in this connexion Cortez affords him
+a rich storehouse of material. On the other hand, all objections against
+the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel collapse miserably. It is true that,
+like the others, it offers no historically accurate report of the
+discourses of Jesus. It pictures Him as the Logos-Christ and makes Him
+speak in this character; which Jesus certainly did not do. Inadvertently
+the author makes John the Baptist speak in the same way. That does not
+matter, however, for the historical conditions are rightly represented;
+rightly, because Jerusalem was the scene of the greater part of the
+ministry, and the five Johannine miracles are to be retained. The healing
+of the nobleman's son, that of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, and
+that of the man blind from birth happened just as they are told. The story
+of the miracle at Cana rests on a misunderstanding, for the wine which
+Jesus provided was really the wedding-gift which He had brought with Him.
+In the raising of Lazarus a real case of apparent death is combined with a
+polemical exaggeration of it, the restoration to life becoming, in the
+course of controversy with the Jews, an actual resurrection. Having thus
+won free, dragging John along with him, from the toils of the Hegelian
+denial of miracle--only, it is true, by the aid of Venturini--and being
+prepared to explain the feeding of the multitude on the most commonplace
+rationalistic lines, he may well boast that he has "driven the doubt
+concerning the Fourth Gospel into a very small corner."
+
+"The miserable era of negation," cries Gfroerer, "is now at an end;
+affirmation begins. We are ascending the eastern mountains from which the
+pure airs of heaven breathe upon the spirit. Our guide shall be historical
+mathematics, a science which is as yet known to few, and has not been
+applied by any one to the New Testament." This "mathematic" of Gfroerer's
+consists in developing his whole argument out of a single postulate. Let
+it be granted to him that all other claimants of the Messiahship--Gfroerer,
+in defiance of the evidence of Josephus, makes all the leaders of revolt
+in Palestine claimants of the Messiahship--were put to death by the Romans,
+whereas Jesus was crucified by His own people: it follows that the
+Messiahship of Jesus was not political, but spiritual. He had declared
+Himself to be in a certain sense the longed-for Messiah, but in another
+sense He was not so. His preaching moved in the sphere of Philonian ideas;
+although He did not as yet explicitly apply the Logos doctrine, it was
+implicit in His thought, so that the discourses of the Fourth Gospel have
+an essential truth. All Messianic conceptions, the Kingdom of God, the
+judgment, the future world, are sublimated into the spiritual region. The
+resurrection of the dead becomes a present eternal life. The saying in
+John v. 24, "He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me,
+hath eternal life and cometh not into judgment; but is passed from death
+into life," is the only authentic part of that discourse. The reference
+which follows to the coming judgment and the resurrection of the dead is a
+Jewish interpolation. Jesus did not believe that He Himself was to rise
+from the dead. Nevertheless, the "resurrection" is historic; Joseph of
+Arimathea, a member of the Essene Order, whose tool Jesus unconsciously
+was, had bribed the Romans to make the crucifixion of Jesus only a
+pretence, and to crucify two others with Him in order to distract
+attention from Him. After He was taken down from the cross, Joseph removed
+Him to a tomb of his own which had been hewn out for the purpose in the
+neighbourhood of the cross, and succeeded in resuscitating Him. The
+Christian Church grew out of the Essene Order by giving a further
+development to its ideas, and it is impossible to explain the organisation
+of the Church without taking account of the regulations of the Order. The
+work closes with a rhapsody on the Church and its development into the
+Papal system.
+
+Gfroerer thus works into Venturini's plan a quantity of material drawn from
+Philo. His first volume would have led one to expect a more original and
+scientific result. But the author is one of those "epileptics of
+criticism" for whom criticism is not a natural and healthy means of
+arriving at a result, but who, in consequence of the fits of criticism to
+which they are subject, and which they even endeavour to intensify, fall
+into a condition of exhaustion, in which the need for some fixed point
+becomes so imperative that they create it for themselves by self-
+suggestion--as they previously did their criticism--and then flatter
+themselves that they have really found it.
+
+This need for a fixed point carried the former rival of Strauss into
+Catholicism, for which his "General History of the Church" (1841-1846)
+already shows a strong admiration. After the appearance of this work
+Gfroerer became Professor of History in the University of Freiburg. In 1848
+he was active in the German Parliament in endeavouring to promote a
+reunion of the Protestants with the Catholics. In 1853 he went over to the
+Roman Church. His family had already gone over, at Strassburg, during the
+revolutionary period. In the conflict of the church with the Baden
+Government he vehemently supported the claims of the Pope. He died in
+1861.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Incomparably better and more thorough is the attempt to write a Life of
+Jesus embodied in the "Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the
+German Nation." Their writer takes Gfroerer's studies as his starting-
+point, but instead of spiritualising unjustifiably he ventures to conceive
+the Jewish world of thought in which Jesus lived in its simple realism. He
+was the first to place the eschatology recognised by Strauss and Reimarus
+in an historical setting--that of Venturini's plan--and to write a Life of
+Jesus entirely governed by the idea of eschatology.
+
+The author, Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, was born in 1807 at Erlangen. His
+first studies were in theology. His rationalistic views, however,
+compelled him to abandon the clerical profession. He became librarian at
+Nuremberg in 1841 and engaged in controversial writing of an anti-orthodox
+character, but distinguished himself also by historical work of
+outstanding merit. A year after the publication of the "Theological
+Letters," which he issued under the pseudonym of Richard von der Alm, he
+published a collection of "The Opinions of Heathen and Christian Writers
+of the first Christian Centuries about Jesus Christ" (1864), a work which
+gives evidence of a remarkable range of reading. In 1855 he removed to
+Munich in the hope of obtaining a post in the diplomatic service, but in
+spite of his solid acquirements he did not succeed. No one would venture
+to appoint a man of such outspoken anti-ecclesiastical views. He died in
+1876.
+
+As regards the question of the sources, Ghillany occupies very nearly the
+Tuebingen standpoint, except that he holds Matthew to be later than Luke,
+and Mark to be extracted, not from these Gospels in their present form,
+but from their sources. John is not authentic.
+
+The worship offered to Jesus after His death by the Christian community
+is, according to Ghillany, not derived from pure Judaism, but from a
+Judaism influenced by oriental religions. The influence of the cult of
+Mithra, for example, is unmistakable. In it, as in Christianity, we find
+the virgin-birth, the star, the wise men, the cross, and the resurrection.
+Were it not for the human sacrifice of the Mithra cult, the idea which is
+operative in the Supper, of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the
+Son of Man, would be inexplicable.
+
+The whole Eastern world was at that time impregnated with Gnostic ideas,
+which centred in the revelation of the Divine in the human. In this way
+there arose, for example, a Samaritan Gnosis, independent of the
+Christian. Christianity itself is a species of Gnosis. In any case the
+metaphysical conception of the Divine Sonship of Jesus is of secondary
+origin. If He was in any sense the Son of God for the disciples, they can
+only have thought of this sonship in a Gnostic fashion, and supposed that
+the "highest angel," the Son of God, had taken up His abode in Him.
+
+John the Baptist had probably come forth from among the Essenes, and he
+preached a spiritualised Kingdom of Heaven. He held himself to be Elias.
+Jesus' aims were originally similar; He came forward "in the cause of
+sound religious teaching for the people." He made no claim to Davidic
+descent; that is to be credited to dogmatic theology. Similarly Papias is
+wrong in ascribing to Jesus the crude eschatological expectations implied
+in the saying about the miraculous vine in the Messianic Kingdom.
+
+It is certain, however, that Jesus held Himself to be Messiah and expected
+the early coming of the Kingdom. His teaching is Rabbinic; all His ideas
+have their source in contemporary Judaism, whose world of thought we can
+reconstruct from the Rabbinic writings; for even if these only became
+fixed at a later period, the thoughts on which they are based were already
+current in the time of Jesus. Another source of great importance is
+Justin's "Dialogue with the Jew Trypho."
+
+The starting-point in interpreting the teaching of Jesus is the idea of
+repentance. In the tractate "Sanhedrin" we find: "The set time of the
+Messiah is already here; His coming depends now upon repentance and good
+works. Rabbi Eleazer says, 'When the Jews repent they shall be
+redeemed.' " The Targum of Jonathan observes, on Zech. x. 3, 4,(100) "The
+Messiah is already born, but remains in concealment because of the sins of
+the Hebrews." We find the same thoughts put into the mouth of Trypho in
+Justin. In the same Targum of Jonathan, Isa. liii. is interpreted with
+reference to the sufferings of the Messiah. Judaism, therefore, was not
+unacquainted with the idea of a suffering Messiah. He was not identified,
+however, with the heavenly Messiah of Daniel. The Rabbis distinguished two
+Messiahs, one of Israel and one of Judah. First the Messiah of the Kingdom
+of Israel, denominated the Son of Joseph, was to come from Galilee to
+suffer death at the hands of the Gentiles in order to make atonement for
+the sins of the Hebrew nation. Only after that would the Messiah predicted
+by Daniel, the son of David, of the tribe of Judah, appear in glory upon
+the clouds of heaven. Finally, He also, after two-and-sixty weeks of
+years, should be taken away, since the Messianic Kingdom, even as
+conceived by Paul, was only a temporary supernatural condition of the
+world.
+
+The Messianic expectation, being directed to supernatural events, had no
+political character, and one who knew Himself to be the Messiah could
+never dream of using earthly means for the attainment of His ends; He
+would expect all things to be brought about by the Divine intervention. In
+this respect Ghillany grasps clearly the character of the eschatology of
+Jesus--more clearly than any one had ever done before.
+
+The role of the Messiah, who prior to His supernatural manifestation
+remains in concealment upon earth, is therefore passive. He who is
+conscious of a Messianic vocation does not seek to found a Kingdom among
+men. He waits with confidence. He issues forth from His passivity with the
+sole purpose of making atonement, by vicarious suffering, for the sins of
+the people, in order that it may be possible for God to bring about the
+new condition of things. If, in spite of the repentance of the people and
+the occurrence of the signs which pointed to its being at hand, the coming
+of the Kingdom should be delayed, the man who is conscious of a Messianic
+vocation must, by His death, compel the intervention of God. His vocation
+in this world is to die.
+
+Brought within the lines of these reflections the Life of Jesus shapes
+itself as follows.
+
+Jesus was the tool of a mystical sect allied to the Essenes, the head of
+which was doubtless that Joseph of Arimathea who makes so sudden and
+striking an appearance in the Gospel narrative. This party desired to
+bring about the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven by mystical means, whereas
+the mass of the people, led astray by the Pharisees, thought to force on
+its coming by means of a rising. In the preacher of a spiritual Kingdom of
+Heaven, who was resolved to go to death for His cause, the mystical party
+discovered Messiah the son of Joseph, and they recognised that His death
+was necessary to make possible the coming of the heavenly Messiah
+predicted by Daniel. That Jesus Himself was the Messiah of Daniel, that He
+would immediately rise again in order to ascend to His heavenly throne,
+and would come thence with the hosts of heaven to establish the Kingdom of
+Heaven, these people did not themselves believe. But they encouraged Him
+in this belief, thinking that He would hardly commit Himself to a
+sacrificial death from which there was to be no resurrection. It was left
+uncertain to His mind whether Jehovah would be content with the repentance
+of the people, in so far as it had taken place, as realising the necessary
+condition for the bringing in of the Kingdom of Heaven, or whether an
+atonement by blood, offered by the death of Messiah the son of Joseph,
+would be needful. It had been explained to Him that when the calculated
+year of grace arrived, He must go up to Jerusalem and endeavour to rouse
+the Jews to Messianic enthusiasm in order to compel Jehovah to come to
+their aid with His heavenly hosts. From the action of Jehovah it could
+then be discovered whether the preaching of repentance and baptism would
+suffice to make atonement for the people before God or not. If Jehovah did
+not appear, a deeper atonement must be made; Jesus must pay the penalty of
+death for the sins of the Jews, but on the third day would rise again from
+the dead and ascend to the throne of God and come again thence to found
+the Kingdom of Heaven. "Any one can see," concludes Ghillany, "that our
+view affords a very natural explanation of the anxiety of the disciples,
+the suspense of Jesus Himself, and the prayer, 'If it be possible let this
+cup pass from me.' "
+
+"It was apparently only towards the close of His life that Jesus revealed
+to the disciples the possibility that the Son of Man might have to suffer
+and die before He could found the Messianic Kingdom."
+
+With this possibility before Him, He came to Jerusalem and there awaited
+the Divine intervention. Meanwhile Joseph of Arimathea lent his aid
+towards securing His condemnation in the Sanhedrin. He must die on the day
+of the Passover; on the day of the Preparation He must be at hand and
+ready in Jerusalem. He held, with His disciples, a love-feast after the
+Essene custom, not a Paschal meal, and in doing so associated thoughts of
+His death with the breaking of bread and the pouring out of the wine. "He
+did not lay upon His disciples any injunction to continue the celebration
+of a feast of this kind until the time of His return, because He thought
+of His resurrection and His heavenly glory as about to take place after
+three days. But when His return was delayed the early Christians attached
+these sayings of His about the bread and wine to their Essene love-feast,
+and explained this common meal of the community as a commemoration of the
+Last Supper of Jesus and His disciples, a memorial Feast in honour of
+their Saviour, the celebration of which must be continued until His
+coming."
+
+When the armed band came to arrest Him, Jesus surrendered to His fate.
+Pilate almost set Him free, holding Him to be a mere enthusiast who placed
+His hopes only in the Divine intervention. Joseph of Arimathea, however,
+succeeded in averting this danger. "Even on the cross Jesus seems to have
+continued to hope for the Divine intervention, as is evidenced by the cry,
+'My God! My God! why hast thou forsaken me?' " Joseph of Arimathea
+provided for His burial.
+
+The belief in His resurrection rests upon the visions of the disciples,
+which are to be explained by their intense desire for the Parousia, of
+which He had given them the promise. After setting their affairs in order
+in Galilee they returned at the Feast of Pentecost to Jerusalem, which
+they had left in alarm, in order there to await the Parousia in company
+with other Galilaean believers.
+
+The confession of faith of the primitive Christian community was the
+simplest conceivable: Jesus the Messiah had come, not as a temporal
+conqueror, but as the Son of Man foretold by Daniel, and had died for the
+sins of the people. In other respects they were strict Jews, kept the Law,
+and were constantly in the Temple. Only the community of goods and the
+brotherhood-meal are of an Essene character.
+
+"The Christianity of the original community in Jerusalem was thus a
+mixture of Zealotism and Mysticism which did not include any wholly new
+element, and even in its conception of the Messiah had nothing peculiar to
+itself except the belief that the Son of Man predicted by Daniel had
+already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth ... that He was now
+enthroned at the right hand of God, and would again appear as the expected
+Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven according to Daniel's prophecy."
+Jesus, therefore, had triumphed over the mystical party who desired to
+make use of Him in the character of Messiah the son of Joseph--their
+Messiah, the heavenly Son of Man, had not come. Jesus, in virtue of what
+He had done, had taken His place both in heaven and in earth.
+
+How much of Venturini's plan is here retained? Only the "mystical part"
+which serves the purpose of setting the action of the drama in motion. All
+the rest of it, the rationalistic part, has been transmuted into an
+historical conception. Miracle and trickery, along with the stage-play
+resurrection, have been purged away in the fires of Strauss's criticism.
+There remains only a fundamental conception which has a certain
+greatness--a brotherhood which looks for the coming of the Kingdom of
+Heaven appoints one of its members to undergo as Messiah an atoning death,
+that the coming of the Kingdom, for which the time is at hand, may not be
+delayed. This brotherhood is the only fictitious element in the whole
+construction--much as in the primitive steam-engine the valves were still
+worked by hand while the rest of the machinery was actuated by its own
+motive-power. So in this Life of Jesus the motive-power is drawn entirely
+from historical sources, and the want of an automatic starting arrangement
+is a mere anachronism. Strike out the superfluous role of Joseph of
+Arimathea, and the distinction of the two Messiahs, which is not clear
+even in the Rabbis, and substitute the simple hypothesis that Jesus, in
+the course of His Messianic vocation, when He thinks the time for the
+coming of the Kingdom has arrived, goes freely to Jerusalem, and, as it
+were, compels the secular power to put Him to death, in order by this act
+of atonement to win for the world the immediate coming of the Kingdom, and
+for Himself the glory of the Son of Man--make these changes, and you have a
+life of Jesus in which the motive-power is a purely historical force. It
+is impossible to indicate briefly all the parts of which the seemingly
+complicated, but in reality impressively simple, mechanism of this Life of
+Jesus is composed. The conduct of Jesus, alike in its resolution and in
+its hesitation, becomes clear, and not less so that of the disciples. All
+far-fetched historical ingenuity is dispensed with. Jesus acts "because
+His hour is come." This decisive placing of the Life of Jesus in the "last
+time" (_cf._ 1 Peter i. 20 {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK KORONIS~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~})
+is an historical achievement without parallel. Not less so is the placing
+of the thought of the passion in its proper eschatological setting as an
+act of atonement. Where had the character and origin of the primitive
+community ever been brought into such clear connexion with the death of
+Jesus? Who had ever before so earnestly considered the problem why the
+Christian community arose in Jerusalem and not in Galilee? "But the
+solution is too simple, and, moreover, is not founded on a severely
+scientific chain of reasoning, but on historical intuition and experiment,
+the simple experiment of introducing the Life of Jesus into the Jewish
+eschatological world of thought"--so the theologians replied, or so, at
+least, they might have replied if they had taken this curious work
+seriously, if, indeed, they had read it at all. But how were they to
+suspect that in a book which seemed to aim at founding a new Deistic
+Church, and which went out with the Wolfenbuettel Fragmentist into the
+desert of the most barren natural religion, a valuable historical
+conception might be found? It is true that no one suspected at that time
+that in the forgotten work of Reimarus there lay a dangerous historical
+discovery, a kind of explosive material such as can only be collected by
+those who stand free from every responsibility towards historical
+Christianity, who have abandoned every prejudice, in the good sense as
+well as in the bad--and whose one desire in regard to the Gospel history is
+to be "spirits that constantly deny."(101) Such thinkers, if they have
+historical gifts, destroy artificial history in the cause of true history
+and, willing evil, do good--if it be admitted that the discovery of truth
+is good. If this negative work is a good thing, the author of the "Letters
+to the German People" performed a distinguished service, for his negation
+is radical. The new Church which was to be founded on this historic
+overcoming of historic Christianity was to combine "only what was
+according to reason in Judaism and Christianity." From Judaism it was to
+take the belief in one sole, spiritual, perfect God; from Christianity the
+requirement of brotherly love to all men. On the other hand, it was to
+eliminate what was contrary to reason in each: from Judaism the ritual
+system and the sacrifices; from Christianity the deification of Jesus and
+the teaching of redemption through His blood. How comes so completely
+unhistorical a temperament to be combined with so historical an intellect?
+His Jesus, after all, has no individuality; He is a mere eschatological
+machine.
+
+In accordance with the confession of faith of the new Church of which
+Ghillany dreamed, the calendar of the Feasts is to be transformed as
+follows:--
+
+1. Feast of the Deity, the first and second of January.
+
+2. Feast of the Dignity of Man and Brotherly Love, first and second of
+April.
+
+3. Feast of the Divine Blessing in Nature, first and second of July.
+
+4. Feast of Immortality, first and second of October.
+
+Apart from these eight Feast days, and the Sundays, all the other days of
+the year are working days.
+
+From the order of divine service we may note the following: "The sermon,
+which should begin with instruction and exhortation and close with
+consolation and encouragement, must not last longer than half an hour."
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+The series of Lives of Jesus which combine criticism with fiction is
+closed by Noack's Story of Jesus. A freethinker like Ghillany, but lacking
+the financial independence which a kindly fate had conferred upon the
+latter, Noack led a life which may properly be described as a constant
+martyrdom, lightened only by his intense love of theological studies,
+which nevertheless were responsible for all his troubles. Born in 1819, of
+a clerical family in Hesse, he became in 1842 Pastor's assistant and
+teacher of religion at Worms in the Hessian Palatinate. The Darmstadt
+reactionaries drove him out of this position in 1844 without his having
+given any ground of offence. In 1849 he became "Repetent" in Philosophy at
+the University of Giessen at a salary of four hundred gulden. In 1855 he
+was promoted to be Professor Extraordinary without having his salary
+raised. In 1870, at the age of 51, he was appointed assistant at the
+University Library and received at the same time the title of Ordinary
+Professor. He died in 1885. He was an extremely prolific writer, always
+ingenious, and possessed of wide knowledge, but he never did anything of
+real permanent value either in philosophy or theology. He was not without
+critical acumen, but there was too much of the poet in him; a critical
+discovery was an incitement to an imaginative reconstruction of the
+history. In 1870-1871 he published, after many preliminary studies, his
+chief work, "From the Jordan Uplands to Golgotha; four books on the Gospel
+and the Gospels."(102) It passed unnoticed. Attributing its failure to the
+excitement aroused by the war, which ousted all other interests, he issued
+a revised edition in 1876 under the title "The History of Jesus, on the
+Basis of Free Historical Inquiry concerning the Gospel and the
+Gospels,"(103) but with hardly greater success.
+
+And yet the fundamental critical ideas which can be detected beneath this
+narrative, in spite of its having the form of fiction, give this work a
+significance such as the contemporary Lives of Jesus which won the
+applause of theologians did not possess. It is the only Life of Jesus
+hitherto produced which is written consistently from the Johannine point
+of view from beginning to end. Strauss had not, after all, in Noack's
+opinion, conclusively shown the absolute incompatibility of the Synoptics
+with the Fourth Gospel; neither he nor any other critic had felt the full
+difficulty of the question why the Fourth Evangelist should be at pains to
+invent the numerous journeys to the Feasts, seeing that the development of
+the Logos Christology did not necessarily involve any alteration of the
+scene of the ministry; on the contrary, it would, one might think, have
+been the first care of the Evangelist to inweave his novel theory with the
+familiar tradition in order to avoid discrediting his narrative in advance
+by his innovations. Noack's conclusion is that the inconsistency is not
+due to a single author; it is the result of a long process of redaction in
+which various divergent tendencies have been at work. But as the Fourth
+Gospel is not the logical terminus of the process of alteration, the only
+alternative is to place it at the beginning. What we have to seek in it is
+the original Gospel from which the process of transforming the tradition
+started.
+
+There is also another line of argument based on the contradictions in the
+Gospel tradition which leads to the hypothesis that we have to do with
+redactions of the Gospels. Either Jesus was the Jewish Messiah of the
+Synoptics, or a Son of God in the Greek, spiritual sense, whose self-
+consciousness must be interpreted by means of the Logos doctrine: He
+cannot have been both at the same time. But it is inconceivable that a
+Jewish claimant of the Messiahship would have been left unmolested up to
+the last, and have had virtually to force the authorities to put him to
+death. On the other hand, if He were a simple enthusiast claiming to be a
+Son of God, a man who lived only for his own "self-consciousness," He
+might from the beginning have taken up this attitude without being in any
+way molested, except by the scorn of men. In this respect also, therefore,
+the primitive Gospel which we can recover from John has the advantage. It
+was only later that this "Son of God" became the Jewish Messiah.
+
+We arrive at the primitive Johannine writing when we cancel in the Fourth
+Gospel all Jewish doctrine and all miracles.(104) Its date is the year 60
+and it was composed by--Judas, the beloved disciple. This primitive Gospel
+received little modification and still shows clearly "the wonderful
+reality of its history." It aims only at giving a section of Jesus'
+history, a representation of His attitude of mind and spirit. With "simple
+ingenuousness" it gives, "along with the kernel of the historical material
+of the Gospel, Jesus' thoughts about His own Person in the mysterious
+oracular sayings and deeply thoughtful and moving discourses by which the
+Nazarene stirred rather than enlightened the world." Events of a striking
+character were, however, absent from it. The feeding of the multitude was
+represented in it as effected by natural means. It was a philanthropic
+feeding of a multitude which certainly did not number thousands, the
+numbers are a later insertion; Jesus fed them with bread and fish which He
+purchased from a "sutler-lad." The healing of the lame man at the pool of
+Bethesda was the unmasking of a malingerer, whom the Lord exposed and
+ordered to depart. As He had bidden him carry his bed, and it was on the
+Sabbath, this brought Him into conflict with the authorities. His only
+"acts" were acts of self-revelation--mystical sayings which He threw out to
+the people. "The problem which meets us in His history is in truth a
+psychological problem, how, namely, His exalted view of Himself came to be
+accepted as the purest and highest truth--in His lifetime, it is true, only
+by a limited circle of disciples, but after His departure by a constantly
+growing multitude of believing followers." The gospel of the beloved
+disciple Judas made its way quietly into the world, understood by few,
+even as Jesus Himself had been understood by a few only.
+
+About ten years later, according to Noack, appeared the original form of
+Luke, which we can reconstruct from what is known of Marcion's Luke.(105)
+This Evangelist is under Pauline influence, and writes with an apologetic
+purpose. He desires to refute the calumny that Jesus was "possessed of a
+devil," and he does this by making Him cast out devils. It was in this way
+that miracle forced itself into the Gospel history.
+
+But this primitive Luke, as Noack reconstructs it by combining the
+statements of the Fathers regarding Marcion's Gospel, knows nothing of
+Jesus' journey to Jerusalem to die. This circumstance is of capital
+importance to Noack, because in the course of his attempt to bring the
+topography of the Fourth Gospel into harmony with that of the Synoptics he
+had arrived at the remarkable result that the Johannine Christ worked in
+Galilee, not in Judaea. On the basis of the _Onomasticon_ of
+Eusebius--which Noack, with the aid of topographical traditions derived
+from the Crusaders and statements of Mohammedan writers, interprets with a
+recklessness which is nothing short of criminal--Cana and Bethany
+(Bethabara) were not in the latitude of Jerusalem, but "near the head-
+waters of the Jordan in the upper part of the Jordan valley before it
+flows into the lake of Huleh. There, in Coele-Syria, on the southern slope
+of Hermon, was the scene of John the Baptist's labours; there Jesus began
+His ministry; thither He returned to die." "It is in the Galilaean
+district which forms the scene of the Song of Solomon that the reader of
+this book must be prepared to find the Golgotha of the cross." That is the
+sentence with which Noack's account of the Life of Jesus opens. This
+alludes to an idea which had already been worked out in his "Studies on
+the Song of Solomon,"(106) namely, that the mountain country surrounding
+the upper Jordan was the pre-exilic Judaea, and that the "city of David"
+was situated there. The Jews on their return from exile had at first
+endeavoured to rebuild that Coele-Syrian city of David with the ruins of
+Solomon's Temple, but had been driven away from it and had then taken the
+desperate resolution to build the temple of Zerubbabel upon the high
+plateau lying far to the south of ancient Israel. Ezra the Scribe
+interpolated the forgery on the ground of which this site began to be
+accepted as the former city of David. Under the Syrian oppression all
+remembrance of the ancient city of David entirely disappeared.
+
+This fantastic edifice, in the construction of which the wildest
+etymologies play a part, is founded on the just recognition that a
+reconciliation of John with the Synoptists can only be effected by
+transferring some of the Johannine localities to the North; but this
+involves not only finding Bethany, Arimathea and the other places, but
+even the scene of Jesus' death in this district. The brook Kedron
+conveniently becomes the "brook of Cedars."
+
+For fifty years the two earliest Evangelists, in spite of their poverty of
+incident, sufficed for the needs of the Christians. The "fire of Jesus"
+was fed chiefly by the Pauline Gospel. The original form of the Gospel of
+Luke accordingly became the starting-point of the next stage of
+development. Thus arose the Gospel of Mark. Mark was not a native of
+Palestine, but a man of Roman extraction living in Decapolis, who had not
+the slightest knowledge of the localities in which the life of Jesus was
+really passed. He undertook, about the year 130, "in the interest of the
+new Christian settlement at Jerusalem in Hadrian's time, deliberately and
+consciously to transform the original plan of the Gospel history and to
+represent the Lord as crucified at Jerusalem." The man who from the year
+132 onward, as Mark the Bishop, preached the word of the Crucified to a
+Gentile Christian community amid the ruins of the holy city, had
+previously, as Mark the Evangelist, taken care that a prophet should not
+perish out of Jerusalem. In composing his Gospel he made use, in addition
+to Luke, of a traditional source which he found in Decapolis. He
+deliberately omitted the frequent journeys to Jerusalem which were still
+found in the original Luke, and inserted instead Jesus' journey to His
+death. He it was, also, who made the Nazarite into the Nazarene, laying
+the scene of Jesus' youth in Nazareth. To the cures of demoniacs he added
+magical acts such as the feeding of the multitude and the resurrection.
+
+In Matthew, who appeared about 135, legend and fiction riot unchecked. In
+addition, Jewish parables and sayings are put into the mouth of Jesus,
+whereas He really had nothing to do with the Jewish world of ideas. For if
+anything is certain, it is that the moral maxims of the latest Gospel are
+of a distinctively Jewish origin. About the middle of the second century
+the originals of John and Luke underwent redaction. The redaction of the
+Logos Gospel was completed by the addition of the twenty-first chapter;
+the last redaction of Luke was perhaps carried out by Justin Martyr, fresh
+from completing his "Dialogue with Trypho"! Thus John and Luke are, in
+this final form, which is full of contradictions, the latest Gospels, and
+the saying is fulfilled about the first being last, and the last first.
+
+Arbitrary as these suggestions are, there is nevertheless something
+impressive in the attempt to explain the remarkable inconsistencies which
+are found within the Gospel tradition by considerations relating to its
+origin and development. Despite all his far-fetched ideas, Noack really
+stands higher than some of his contemporaries who showed more prudence in
+their theological enterprises, and about that time were earning the
+applause of the faculty, and quieting the minds of the laity, by
+performing once more the old conjuring trick--assisted by some new feats of
+legerdemain--of harmonising John with the Synoptists in such a way as to
+produce a Life of Jesus which could be turned to the service of
+ecclesiastical theology.
+
+The outline of the public Life of Jesus, as reconstructed by Noack, is as
+follows. It lasted from early in the year 35 to the 14th Nisan of the year
+37, and began in the moment when Jesus revealed His consciousness of what
+He was. We do not know how long previously He had cherished it in secret.
+It is certain that the Baptist helped to bring about this revelation. This
+is the only part which he plays in the Gospel of John. He was neither a
+preacher of repentance, nor an Elias, nor the forerunner of Jesus, nor a
+mere signpost pointing to the Messiah, such as the secondary tradition
+makes him out to be.
+
+Similarly everything that is Messianic in the consciousness of Jesus is
+secondary. The lines of His thought were guided by the Greek ideas about
+sons of God, for the soil of northern Galilee was saturated with these
+ideas. Other sources which contributed something were the personification
+of the Divine Wisdom in the "Wisdom Literature" and some of Philo's
+doctrines. Jesus became the son of God in an ecstatic trance! Had not
+Philo recognised ecstasy as the last and highest means of rising to union
+with the Divine?
+
+Jesus' temperament, according to Noack, was pre-disposed to ecstasy, since
+He was born out of wedlock. One who had this burden upon His spirit may
+well have early taken refuge in His own thoughts, above the clouds, in the
+presence of the God of His fathers. Assailed in a thousand ways by the
+cruelty of the world, it would seem to Him as though His Heavenly Father,
+though unseen, was stretching out to Him the arms of consolation.
+Imagination, which ever mercifully lightens for men the yoke of misery,
+charmed the fatherless child out of His earthly sufferings and put into
+His hand a coloured glass through which He saw the world and life in a
+false light. Ecstatic enthusiasm had carried Him up to the dizzy height of
+spiritual union with the Father in Heaven. A hundred times He was cast
+down out of His dreams into the hard world of reality, to experience once
+more His earthly distresses, but ever anew He won His way by fasting,
+vigil, and prayer to the starry heaven of ecstasy.
+
+"Jesus," Noack explains, "had in thought projected Himself beyond His
+earthly nativity and risen to the conception that His ego had been in
+existence before this earthly body in which He stood visibly upon the
+stage of the world. He felt that His ego had had being and life before He
+became incarnate upon earth.... This new conception of Himself, born of
+His solitary musings, was incorporated into the very substance of His
+natural personal ego. A new ego had superseded the old natural,
+corporeally conditioned ego."
+
+Ambition, too, came into play--the high ambition to do God a service by the
+offering up of Himself. The passion of self-sacrifice is characteristic of
+a consciousness such as this. According to the document which underlies
+the Johannine Gospel it was not in consequence of outward events that
+Jesus took His resolve to die. "It was the later Gospel tradition which
+exhibited His fate as an inevitable consequence of His conflict with a
+world impervious to spiritual impression." In the original Gospel that
+fate was freely embraced from the outset as belonging to the vocation of
+the Son of God. Only by the constant presence of the thought of death
+could a life which for two years walked the razor edge of such dizzy
+dreams have been preserved from falling. The conviction, or perhaps rather
+the instinctive feeling, that the role of a Son of God upon earth was not
+one to be maintained for decades was the necessary counterpoise to the
+enthusiasm of Jesus' spirit. From the first He was as much at home with
+the thought of death as with His Heavenly Father.
+
+This Son of Man--according to Noack's interpretation the title is
+equivalent to Son of Hope--requires of the multitude that they shall take
+His lofty dream for solid reality. "He revealed His message from heaven to
+the world at the Paschal Feast of the year 35, by throwing out a challenge
+to the Sadducaean hierarchy in Jerusalem." In the time between John's
+removal from the scene and John's death, there falls the visit of Jesus to
+Samaria and a sojourn in the neighbourhood of His Galilaean home. At the
+Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem in the autumn of that year, the healing
+of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda led to a breach with the Sabbatic
+regulations of the Pharisees. Later on, in consequence of His generous
+feeding of the multitude in the Gaulonite table-land, there is an attempt
+to make Him into a Messianic King; which He, however, repudiates. At the
+time of the Passover in Galilee in the year 36, in the synagogue at
+Capernaum, He tests the spiritual insight of those who may, He hopes, be
+ripe for the higher teaching concerning the Son of God made flesh, by the
+touchstone of His mystical words about the bread of life. At the next
+Feast of Tabernacles, in the city of Zion, He makes a last desperate
+attempt to move men's hearts by the parable of the Good Shepherd who is
+ready to lay down His life for His sheep, the people of Israel.
+
+But His adversaries are remorseless; they wound Him to the very depths of
+His spirit by bringing to Him the woman taken in adultery, and asking Him
+what they are to do with her. When this question was sprung upon Him, He
+saw in a moment the public humiliation designed by His adversaries. All
+eyes were turned upon Him, and for a few moments the embarrassment of One
+who was usually so self-possessed was patent to all. He stooped as though
+He desired to write with His finger upon the ground. Was it shame at His
+dishonourable birth that compelled Him thus to lower His gaze? But the
+painful silence of expectation among the spectators did not last long. His
+adversaries repeated their question, He raised His head and spoke the
+undying words: "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone
+at her."
+
+Incensed by His constant references to His heavenly Sonship, they
+endeavour at last to stone Him. He flees from the Temple and takes refuge
+in the Jordan uplands. His purpose is, at the next Passover, that of the
+year 37, here in the mountains which were blessed as Joseph's portion, to
+offer His atoning death as that of the true paschal lamb, and with this
+act to quit the stage of the world's history. He remained in hiding in
+order to avoid the risk of assassination by the emissaries of the
+Pharisees. In Bethany He receives the mysterious visit of the Greeks, who
+doubtless desired to tempt Him to raise the standard of revolt as a
+claimant of the Messiahship, but He refuses to be shaken in His
+determination to die. The washing of the disciples' feet signifies their
+baptism with water, that they might thereafter receive the baptism of the
+Holy Spirit.
+
+Judas, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who was a man of much resource,
+helped Him to avoid being arrested as a disturber of the peace by
+arranging that the "betrayal" should take place on the evening before the
+Passover, in order that Jesus might die, as He desired, on the day of the
+Passover. For this service of love he was, in the secondary tradition,
+torn from the bosom of the Lord and branded as a traitor.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII. RENAN
+
+
+    _Ernest Renan._ La Vie de Jesus. 1863. Paris, Michel Levy Freres.
+    462 pp.
+
+    _E. de Pressense._ Jesus-Christ, son temps, sa vie, son oeuvre.
+    Paris, 1865. 684 pp.
+
+
+Ernest Renan was born in 1823 at Treguier in Brittany. Intended for the
+priesthood, he entered the seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, but there, in
+consequence of reading the German critical theology, he began to doubt the
+truth of Christianity and of its history. In October 1845, shortly before
+the time arrived for him to be ordained a sub-deacon, he left the seminary
+and began to work for his living as a private teacher. In 1849 he received
+a government grant to enable him to make a journey to Italy for the
+prosecution of his studies, the fruits of which appeared in his _Averroes
+et l'Averroisme_ (Paris, 1852); in 1856 he was made a member of the
+Academie des Inscriptions; in 1860 he received from Napoleon III. the
+means to make a journey to Phoenicia and Syria. After his return in 1862
+he obtained the professorship of Semitic Languages at the College de
+France. But the widespread indignation aroused by his Life of Jesus, which
+appeared in the following year, forced the Government to remove him from
+his office. He refused a post as Librarian of the Imperial Library, and
+lived in retirement until the Republic of 1871 restored him to his
+professorship. In politics, as in religion, his position was somewhat
+indefinite. In religion he was no longer a Catholic; avowed free-thought
+was too plebeian for his taste, and in Protestantism the multiplicity of
+sects repelled him. Similarly in politics, in the period immediately
+following the fall of the Empire, he was in turn Royalist, Republican, and
+Bonapartist. At bottom he was a sceptic. He died in 1892, already half-
+forgotten by the public; until his imposing funeral and interment in the
+Pantheon recalled him to its memory.
+
+Like Strauss, Renan designed his Life of Jesus to form part of a complete
+account of the history and dogma of the early Church. His purpose,
+however, was purely historical; it was no part of his project to set up,
+on the basis of the history, a new system of dogma, as Strauss had desired
+to do. This plan was not only conceived, but carried out. _Les Apotres_
+appeared in 1866; _St. Paul_ in 1869; _L'Ante-Christ_ in 1873; _Les
+Evangiles_ in 1877; _L'Eglise chretienne_ in 1879; _Marc-Aurele et la fin
+du monde antique_ in 1881. Several of these works were more valuable than
+the one which opened the series, but for the world Renan continued to be
+the author of the _Vie de Jesus_, and of that alone.
+
+He planned the work at Gaza, and he dedicated it to his sister Henriette,
+who died soon after, in Syria, and lies buried at Byblus.
+
+This was the first Life of Jesus for the Catholic world, which had
+scarcely been touched--the Latin peoples least of all--by the two and a half
+generations of critical study which had been devoted to the subject. It is
+true, Strauss's work had been translated into French,(107) but it had made
+only a passing stir, and that only among a little circle of intellectuals.
+Now came a writer with the characteristic French mental accent, who gave
+to the Latin world in a single book the result of the whole process of
+German criticism.
+
+But Renan's work marked an epoch, not for the Catholic world only, but for
+general literature. He laid the problem which had hitherto occupied only
+theologians before the whole cultured world. And not as a problem, but as
+a question of which he, by means of his historical science and aesthetic
+power of reviving the past, could provide a solution. He offered his
+readers a Jesus who was alive, whom he, with his artistic imagination, had
+met under the blue heaven of Galilee, and whose lineaments his inspired
+pencil had seized. Men's attention was arrested, and they thought to see
+Jesus, because Renan had the skill to make them see blue skies, seas of
+waving corn, distant mountains, gleaming lilies, in a landscape with the
+Lake of Gennesareth for its centre, and to hear with him in the whispering
+of the reeds the eternal melody of the Sermon on the Mount.
+
+Yet the aesthetic feeling for nature which gave birth to this Life of
+Jesus was, it must be confessed, neither pure nor profound. It is a
+standing enigma why French art, which in painting grasps nature with a
+directness and vigour, with an objectivity in the best sense of the word,
+such as is scarcely to be found in the art of any other nation, has in
+poetry treated it in a fashion which scarcely ever goes beyond the lyrical
+and sentimental, the artificial, the subjective, in the worst sense of the
+word. Renan is no exception to this rule, any more than Lamartine or
+Pierre Loti. He looks at the landscape with the eye of a decorative
+painter seeking a _motif_ for a lyrical composition upon which he is
+engaged. But that was not noticed by the many, because they, after all,
+were accustomed to have nature dressed up for them, and had had their
+taste so corrupted by a certain kind of lyricism that they had lost the
+power of distinguishing between truth and artificiality. Even those who
+might have noticed it were so astonished and delighted at being shown
+Jesus in the Galilaean landscape that they were content to yield to the
+enchantment.
+
+Along with this artificial feeling for nature a good many other things
+were accepted without question. There is scarcely any other work on the
+subject which so abounds in lapses of taste--and those of the most
+distressing kind--as Renan's _Vie de Jesus_. It is Christian art in the
+worst sense of the term--the art of the wax image. The gentle Jesus, the
+beautiful Mary, the fair Galilaeans who formed the retinue of the "amiable
+carpenter," might have been taken over in a body from the shop-window of
+an ecclesiastical art emporium in the Place St. Sulpice. Nevertheless,
+there is something magical about the work. It offends and yet it attracts.
+It will never be quite forgotten, nor is it ever likely to be surpassed in
+its own line, for nature is not prodigal of masters of style, and rarely
+is a book so directly born of enthusiasm as that which Renan planned among
+the Galilaean hills.
+
+The essay on the sources of the Life of Jesus with which it opens is
+itself a literary masterpiece. With a kind of effortless ease he makes his
+readers acquainted with the criticism of Strauss, of Baur, of Reuss, of
+Colani. He does not argue, but simply sets the result vividly before the
+reader, who finds himself at once at home in the new world of ideas. He
+avoids any hard or glaring effects; by means of that skilful transition
+from point to point which Wagner in one of his letters praises as the
+highest art, everything is surrounded with atmosphere. But how much
+trickery and illusion there is in this art! In a few strokes he indicates
+the relation of John to the Synoptists; the dilemma is made clear, it
+seems as if one horn or the other must be chosen. Then he begins by artful
+touches to soften down the contrast. The discourses of John are not
+authentic; the historical Jesus cannot have spoken thus. But what about
+the statements of fact? Here Renan declares himself convinced by the
+graphic presentment of the passion story. Touches like "it was night,"
+"they had lighted a fire of coals," "the coat was without seam," cannot
+have been invented. Therefore the Gospel must in some way go back to the
+disciple whom Jesus loved. It is possible, nay certain, that when as an
+old man he read the other Gospels, he was displeased by certain
+inaccuracies, and perhaps vexed that he was given so small a place in the
+history. He began to dictate a number of things which he had better means
+of knowing than the others; partly, too, with the purpose of showing that
+in many cases where Peter only had been mentioned he also had played a
+part, and indeed the principal part. Sometimes his recollection was quite
+fresh, sometimes it had been modified by time. When he wrote down the
+discourses, he had forgotten the Lake of Gennesareth and the winsome words
+which he had listened to upon its shores. He was now living in quite a
+different world. The events of the year 70 destroyed his hopes of the
+return of his Master. His Jewish prejudices fell away, and as he was still
+young, he adapted himself to the syncretistic, philosophic, gnostic
+environment amid which he found himself in Ephesus. Thus even Jesus' world
+of thought took on a new shape for him; although the discourses are
+perhaps rather to be referred to his school than to himself. But, when all
+is said, John remains the best biographer. Or, to put it more accurately,
+while all the Gospels are biographies, they are legendary biographies,
+even though they come down from the first century. Their texts need
+interpretation, and the clue to the interpretation can be supplied by
+aesthetic feeling. They must be subjected to a gentle pressure to bring
+them together, and make them coalesce into a unity in which all the data
+are happily combined.
+
+How this is to be done Renan shows later in his description of the death
+of Jesus. "Suddenly," he says, "Jesus gave a terrible cry in which some
+thought they heard 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,' but which
+others, whose thoughts were running on the fulfilment of prophecy,
+reported as 'It is finished.' "
+
+The authentic sayings of Jesus are more or less self-evidencing. Coming in
+contact with one of them amid the welter of heterogeneous traditions, you
+feel a thrill of recognition. They leap forth and take their proper place,
+where their vivid power becomes apparent. For one who writes the life of
+Jesus on His native soil, the Gospels are not so much sources of
+information as incentives to revelation. "I had," Renan avows, "a fifth
+Gospel before my eyes, mutilated in parts, but still legible, and taking
+it for my guide I saw behind the narratives of Matthew and Mark, instead
+of an ideal Being of whom it might be maintained that He had never
+existed, a glorious human countenance full of life and movement." It is
+this Jesus of the fifth Gospel that he desires to portray.
+
+In looking at the picture, the reader must not allow the vexed question of
+miracle to distract him and disturb the proper frame of mind. The author
+refuses to assert either the possibility or the impossibility of miracle,
+but speaks only as an historian. "We do not say miracle is impossible, we
+say only that there has never been a satisfactorily authenticated
+miracle."
+
+In view of the method of treatment adopted by Renan there can, of course,
+be no question of an historical plan. He brings in each saying at the
+point where it seems most appropriate. None of them is passed over, but
+none of them appears in its historical setting. He shifts individual
+incidents hither and thither in the most arbitrary fashion. For example,
+the coming of Jesus' mother to seek Him (in the belief that He is beside
+Himself) must belong to the later part of Jesus' life, since it is out of
+tone with the happy innocence of the earlier period. Certain scenes are
+transposed from the later period to the earlier, because they are not
+gloomy enough for the later time. Others again are made the basis of an
+unwarranted generalisation. It is not enough that Jesus once rode upon an
+ass while the disciples in the intoxication of joy cast their garments in
+the way; according to Renan, He constantly rode about, even in Galilee,
+upon a mule, "that favourite riding-animal of the East, which is so docile
+and sure-footed and whose great dark eyes, shaded by long lashes, are full
+of gentleness." Sometimes the disciples surrounded Him with rustic pomp,
+using their garments by way of carpeting. They laid them upon the mule
+which carried Him, or spread them before Him on the way.
+
+Scenes of little significance are sometimes elaborately described by Renan
+while more important ones are barely touched on. "One day, indeed," he
+remarks in describing the first visit to Jerusalem, "anger seems to have,
+as the saying goes, overmastered Him; He struck some of the miserable
+chafferers with the scourge, and overthrew their tables." Such is the
+incidental fashion in which the cleansing of the temple was brought in. In
+this way it is possible to smuggle in a miracle without giving any further
+explanation of it. The miracle at Cana is brought, by means of the
+following unobtrusive turn of phrase, into the account of the period of
+success in Galilee. "One of His miracles was done by Jesus for the sole
+purpose of increasing the happiness of a wedding-party in a little country
+town."
+
+This Life of Jesus is introduced by a kind of prelude. Jesus had been
+living in Galilee before He came to the Baptist; when He heard of the
+latter's success He went to him with His little company of followers. They
+were both young, and Jesus became the imitator of the Baptist. Fortunately
+the latter soon disappeared from the scene, for his influence on Jesus was
+in some respects injurious. The Galilaean teacher was on the verge of
+losing the sunny religion which He had learned from His only teacher, the
+glorious natural scenery which surrounded His home, and of becoming a
+gloomy Jewish fanatic. But this influence fell away from Him again; when
+He returned to Galilee He became Himself once more. The only thing which
+He had gained from John was some knowledge of the art of preaching. He had
+learned from him how to influence masses of men. From that time forward He
+preached with much more power and gained greater ascendancy over the
+people.
+
+With the return to Galilee begins the first act of the piece. The story of
+the rise of Christianity is a pastoral play. Bauer, in his "Philo,
+Strauss, and Renan," writes with biting sarcasm: "Renan, who is at once
+the author of the play, the stage-manager, and the director of the
+theatre, gives the signal to begin, and at a sign from him the electric
+lights are put on full power, the Bengal fires flare up, the footlights
+are turned higher, and while the flutes and shawms of the orchestra strike
+up the overture, the people enter and take their places among the bushes
+and by the shore of the Lake." And how confiding they were, this gentle
+and peaceful company of Galilaean fisher folk! And He, the young
+carpenter, conjured the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth for a year, by the
+spell of the infinite tenderness which radiated from Him. A company of men
+and women, all of the same youthful integrity and simple innocence, became
+His followers and constantly repeated "Thou art the Messiah." By the women
+He was more beloved than He Himself liked, but from His passion for the
+glory of His Father He was content to attract these "fair creatures"
+(_belles creatures_) and suffered them to serve Him, and God through Him.
+Three or four devoted Galilaean women constantly accompanied Him and
+strove with one another for the pleasure (_le plaisir_) of listening to
+His teaching and attending to His comfort. Some of them were wealthy and
+used their means to enable the "amiable" (_charmant_) prophet to live
+without needing to practise His handicraft. The most devoted of all was
+Mary Magdalene, whose disordered mind had been healed by the influence of
+the pure and gracious beauty (_par la beaute pure et douce_) of the young
+Rabbi.
+
+Thus He rode, on His long-eyelashed gentle mule, from village to village,
+from town to town. The sweet theology of love (_la delicieuse theologie de
+l'amour_) won Him all hearts. His preaching was gentle and mild (_suave et
+douce_), full of nature and the fragrance of the country. Wherever He went
+the people kept festival. At marriages He was a welcome guest; to the
+feasts which He gave He invited women who were sinners, and publicans like
+the good Zacchaeus.
+
+"The Frenchman," remarks Noack, "takes the mummied figure of the Galilaean
+Rabbi, which criticism has exhumed, endows it with life and energy, and
+brings Him upon the stage, first amid the lustre of the earthly happiness
+which it was His pleasure to bestow, and then in the moving aspect of one
+doomed to suffer."
+
+When Jesus goes up to the Passover at the end of this first year, He comes
+into conflict with the Rabbis of the capital. The "winsome teacher, who
+offered forgiveness to all on the sole condition of loving Him," found in
+the capital people upon whom His charm had no effect. When He returned to
+Galilee He had entirely abandoned His Jewish beliefs, and a revolutionary
+ardour glowed in His heart. The second act begins. "The action becomes
+more serious and gloomy, and the pupil of Strauss turns down the
+footlights of his stage."(108) The erstwhile "winsome moralist" has become
+a transcendental revolutionary. Up to this point He had thought to bring
+about the triumph of the Kingdom of God by natural means, by teaching and
+influencing men. The Jewish eschatology stood vaguely in the background.
+Now it becomes prominent. The tension set up between His purely ethical
+ideas and these eschatological expectations gives His words from this time
+forward a special force. The period of joyous simplicity is past.
+
+Even the character of the hero loses its simplicity. In the furtherance of
+His cause He becomes a wonder-worker. It is true that even before He had
+sometimes practised innocent arts such as Joan of Arc made use of
+later.(109) He had, for instance, pretended to know the unspoken thoughts
+of one whom He desired to win, had reminded him, perhaps, of some
+experience of which he cherished the memory. He allowed the people to
+believe that He received knowledge of certain matters through a kind of
+revelation. Finally, it came to be whispered that He had spoken with Moses
+and Elias upon the mountains. But He now finds Himself compelled to adopt
+in earnest the role which He had formerly taken, as it were, in play.
+Against His will He is compelled to found His work upon miracle. He must
+face the alternative of either renouncing His mission or becoming a
+thaumaturge. He consented, therefore, to play an active part in many
+miracles. In this astute friends gave Him their aid. At Bethany something
+happened which could be regarded as a raising of the dead. Perhaps this
+miracle was arranged by Lazarus himself. When very ill he had allowed
+himself to be wrapped in the cerements of the dead and laid in the grave.
+His sisters sent for Jesus and brought Him to the tomb. He desired to look
+once more upon His friend, and when, overcome with grief, He cried his
+name aloud, Lazarus came forth from the grave. Why should the brother and
+sisters have hesitated to provide a miracle for the Master, in whose
+miracle-working power they, indeed, believed? Where, then, was Renan's
+allegiance to his "honoured master" Strauss, when he thus enrolled himself
+among the rationalists?
+
+On these lines Jesus played His part for eighteen months, from the Easter
+of 31 to the Feast of Tabernacles of 32. How great is the change from the
+gentle teacher of the Sermon on the Mount! His discourse takes on a
+certain hardness of tone. In the synagogue at Capernaum He drives many
+from Him, offended by the saying about eating and drinking His flesh and
+blood. The "extreme materialism of the expression," which in Him had
+always been the natural counterpoise to the "extreme idealism of the
+thought," becomes more and more pronounced. His "Kingdom of God" was
+indeed still essentially the kingdom of the poor, the kingdom of the soul,
+the great spiritual kingdom; but He now preached it as the kingdom of the
+apocalyptic writings. And yet in the very moment when He seems to be
+staking everything upon a supernatural fulfilment of His hopes, He
+provides with remarkable prescience the basis of a permanent Church. He
+appoints the Twelve Apostles and institutes the fellowship-meal. It is
+certain, Renan thinks, that the "Supper" was not first instituted on that
+last evening; even in the second Galilaean period He must have practised
+with His followers the mystic rite of the Breaking of Bread, which in some
+way symbolised His death.
+
+By the end of this period He had cast off all earthly ambitions. Nothing
+of earth existed for Him any more. A strange longing for persecution and
+martyrdom had taken possession of Him. It was not, however, the resolve to
+offer an atonement for the sins of His people which familiarised Him with
+the thought of death; it was forced upon Him by the knowledge that He had
+entered upon a path in which it was impossible for Him to sustain His role
+for more than a few months, or perhaps even weeks. So He sets out for
+Jerusalem, outwardly a hero, inwardly half in despair because He has
+turned aside from His true path. The gentle, faithful, long-eyelashed mule
+bears Him, amid the acclamations of the multitude, through the gate of the
+capital.
+
+The third act begins: the stage is dark and becomes constantly darker,
+until at last, through the darkness of the scene, there is faintly visible
+only the figure of a woman--of her who in her deep grief beside the grave
+was by her vision to call to life again Him whom she loved. There was
+darkness, too, in the souls of the disciples, and in that of the Master.
+The bitter jealousy between Judas and John made one of them a traitor. As
+for Jesus, He had His hour of gloom to fight through in Gethsemane. For a
+moment His human nature awakened in Him; all that He thought He had slain
+and put behind Him for ever rose up and confronted Him as He knelt there
+upon the ground. "Did He remember the clear brooks of Galilee at which He
+might have slaked His thirst--the vine and the fig-tree beneath which He
+might have rested--the maidens who would perhaps have been willing to love
+Him? Did He regret His too exalted nature? Did He, a martyr to His own
+greatness, weep that He had not remained the simple carpenter of Nazareth?
+We do not know!"
+
+He is dead. Renan, as though he stood in Pere Lachaise, commissioned to
+pronounce the final allocution over a member of the Academy, apostrophises
+Him thus: "Rest now, amid Thy glory, noble pioneer. Thou conqueror of
+death, take the sceptre of Thy Kingdom, into which so many centuries of
+Thy worshippers shall follow Thee, by the highway which Thou hast opened
+up."
+
+The bell rings; the curtain begins to fall; the swing-seats tilt. The
+epilogue is scarcely heard: "Jesus will never have a rival. His religion
+will again and again renew itself; His story will call forth endless
+tears: His sufferings will soften the hearts of the best; every successive
+century will proclaim that among the sons of men there hath not arisen a
+greater than Jesus."
+
+The book passed through eight editions in three months. The writings of
+those who opposed it had an equal vogue. That of Freppel had reached its
+twelfth edition in 1864.(110) Their name was legion. Whatever wore a
+soutane and could wield a pen charged against Renan, the bishops leading
+the van. The tone of these attacks was not always very elevated, nor their
+logic very profound. In most cases the writers were only concerned to
+defend the Deity of Christ,(111) and the miracles, and are satisfied that
+they have done so when they have pointed out some of the glaring
+inconsistencies in Renan's work. Here and there, however, among these
+refutations we catch the tone of a loftier ethical spirit which has
+recognised the fundamental weakness of the work, the lack of any definite
+ethical principles in the writer's outlook upon life.(112) There were some
+indeed who were not content with a refutation; they would gladly have seen
+active measures taken against Renan. One of his most embittered
+adversaries, Amadee Nicolas,(113) reckons up in an appendix to his work
+the maximum penalties authorised by the existing enactments against free-
+thought, and would welcome the application of the law of the 25th of March
+1822, according to which five years' imprisonment could be imposed for the
+crime of "insulting or making ridiculous a religion recognised by the
+state."
+
+Renan was defended by the _Siecle_, the _Debats_, at that time the leading
+French newspaper, and the _Temps_, in which Scherer published five
+articles upon the book. Even the _Revue des deux mondes_, which had
+formerly raised a warning voice against Strauss, allowed itself to go with
+the stream, and published in its August number of 1863 a critical analysis
+by Havet(114) who hailed Renan's work as a great achievement, and
+criticised only the inconsistencies by which he had endeavoured to soften
+down the radical character of his undertaking. Later on the _Revue_
+changed its attitude and sided with Renan's opponents. In the Protestant
+camp there was an even keener sense of distaste than in the Catholic for
+the sentimental gloss which Renan had spread over his work to make it
+attractive to the multitude by its iridescent colours. In four remarkable
+letters Athanase Coquerel the younger took the author to task for
+this.(115) From the standpoint of orthodox scholarship E. de Pressense
+condemned him;(116) and proceeded without loss of time to refute him in a
+large-scale Life of Jesus.(117) He was answered by Albert Reville,(118)
+who claims recognition for Renan's services to criticism.
+
+In general, however, the rising French school of critical theology was
+disappointed in Renan. Their spokesman was Colani. "This is not the Christ
+of history, the Christ of the Synoptics," he writes in 1864 in the _Revue
+de theologie_, "but the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, though without His
+metaphysical halo, and painted over with a brush which has been dipped in
+the melancholy blue of modern poetry, in the rose of the eighteenth-
+century idyll, and in the grey of a moral philosophy which seems to be
+derived from La Rochefoucauld." "In expressing this opinion," he adds, "I
+believe I am speaking in the name of those who belong to what is known as
+the new Protestant theology, or the Strassburg school. We opened M.
+Renan's book with sympathetic interest; we closed it with deep
+disappointment."(119)
+
+The Strassburg school had good cause to complain of Renan, for he had
+trampled their growing crops. They had just begun to arouse some interest,
+and slowly and surely to exercise an influence upon the whole spiritual
+life of France. Sainte-Beuve had called attention to the work of Reuss,
+Colani, Reville, and Scherer. Others of the school were Michel Nicolas of
+Montauban and Gustave d'Eichthal. Nefftzer, the editor of the _Temps_, who
+was at the same time a prophet of coming political events, defended their
+cause in the Parisian literary world. The _Revue germanique_ of that
+period, the influence of which upon French literature can hardly be over-
+estimated, was their sworn ally. Then came Renan and threw public opinion
+into a ferment of excitement. Everything in the nature of criticism, and
+of progress in religious thought, was associated with his name, and was
+thereby discredited. By his untimely and over-easy popularisation of the
+ideas of the critical school he ruined their quiet work. The excitement
+roused by his book swept away all that had been done by those noble and
+lofty spirits, who now found themselves involved in a struggle with the
+outraged orthodoxy of Paris, and were hard put to it to defend themselves.
+Even down to the present day Renan's work forms the greatest hindrance to
+any serious advance in French religious thought.
+
+The excitement aroused upon the other side of the Rhine was scarcely less
+than in Paris. Within a year there appeared five different German
+translations, and many of the French criticisms of Renan were also
+translated.(120) The German Catholic press was wildly excited;(121) the
+Protestant press was more restrained, more inclined to give the author a
+fair hearing, and even ventured to express admiration of the historical
+merits of his performance. Beyschlag(122) saw in Renan an advance upon
+Strauss, inasmuch as for him the life of Jesus as narrated in the Gospels,
+while not, indeed, in any sense supernatural, is nevertheless historical.
+For a certain school of theology, therefore, Renan was a deliverer from
+Strauss; they were especially grateful to him for his defence, sophistical
+though it was, of the Fourth Gospel. Weizsaecker expressed his admiration.
+Strauss, far from directing his "Life of Jesus for the German People,"
+with which he was then occupied, against the superficial and frivolous
+French treatment of the subject--as has sometimes been alleged--hailed Renan
+in his preface as a kindred spirit and ally, and "shook hands with him
+across the Rhine." Luthardt,(123) however, remained inexorable. "What is
+there lacking in Renan's work?" he asks. And he replies, "It lacks
+conscience."
+
+That is a just judgment. From this lack of conscience, Renan has not been
+scrupulous where he ought to have been so. There is a kind of insincerity
+in the book from beginning to end. Renan professes to depict the Christ of
+the Fourth Gospel, though he does not believe in the authenticity or the
+miracles of that Gospel. He professes to write a scientific work, and is
+always thinking of the great public and how to interest it. He has thus
+fused together two works of disparate character. The historian finds it
+hard to forgive him for not going more deeply into the problem of the
+development in the thought of Jesus, with which he was brought face to
+face by the emphasis which he laid on eschatology, and for offering in
+place of a solution the highly-coloured phrases of the novelist.
+
+Nevertheless, this work will always retain a certain interest, both for
+Frenchmen and for Germans. The German is often so completely fascinated by
+it as to lose his power of criticism, because he finds in it German
+thought in a novel and piquant form. Conversely the Frenchman discovers in
+it, behind the familiar form, which is here handled in such a masterly
+fashion, ideas belonging to a world which is foreign to him, ideas which
+he can never completely assimilate, but which yet continually attract him.
+In this double character of the work lies its imperishable charm.
+
+And its weakness? That it is written by one to whom the New Testament was
+to the last something foreign, who had not read it from his youth up in
+the mother-tongue, who was not accustomed to breathe freely in its simple
+and pure world, but must perfume it with sentimentality in order to feel
+himself at home in it.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV. THE "LIBERAL" LIVES OF JESUS
+
+
+    _David Friedrich Strauss._ Das Leben Jesu fuer das deutsche Volk
+    bearbeitet. (A Life of Jesus for the German People.) Leipzig,
+    1864. 631 pp.
+
+    Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte. Eine
+    Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu. (The Christ of Faith
+    and the Jesus of History, a Criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of
+    Jesus.) Berlin, 1865. 223 pp. Appendix, pp. 224-240.
+
+    Der Schenkel'sche Handel in Baden. (The Schenkel Affair in Baden.)
+    A corrected reprint from No. 441 of the _National-Zeitung_, of the
+    21st September 1864.
+
+    Die Halben und die Ganzen. (The Half-way-ers and the Whole-way-
+    ers.) 1865.
+
+    _Daniel Schenkel._ Das Charakterbild Jesu. (The Portrait of
+    Jesus.) Wiesbaden, 1864 (ed. 1 and 2). 405 pp. Fourth edition,
+    with a preface opposing Strauss's "Der alte und der neue Glaube"
+    (The Old Faith and the New), 1873.
+
+    _Karl Heinrich Weizsaecker._ Untersuchungen ueber die evangelische
+    Geschichte, ihre Quellen und den Gang ihrer Entwicklung. (Studies
+    in the Gospel History, its Sources and the Progress of its
+    Development.) Gotha, 1864. 580 pp.
+
+    _Heinrich Julius Holtzmann._ Die synoptischen Evangelien. Ihr
+    Ursprung und geschichtlicher Charakter. (The Synoptic Gospels.
+    Their Origin and Historical Character.) Leipzig, 1863. 514 pp.
+
+    _Theodor Keim._ Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara. (The History of
+    Jesus of Nazara.) 3 vols., Zurich; vol. i., 1867, 446 pp.; vol.
+    ii., 1871, 616 pp.; vol. iii., 1872, 667 pp.
+
+    Die Geschichte Jesu. Zurich, 1872. 398 pp.
+
+    _Karl Hase._ Geschichte Jesu. Nach akademischen Vorlesungen. (The
+    History of Jesus. Academic Lectures, revised.) Leipzig, 1876. 612
+    pp.
+
+    _Willibald Beyschlag._ Das Leben Jesu. First Part: Preliminary
+    Investigations, 1885, 450 pp. Second Part: Narrative, 1886, 495
+    pp.; 2nd ed., 1887-1888.
+
+    _Bernhard Weiss._ Das Leben Jesu. 1st ed., 2 vols., 1882; 2nd ed.,
+    1884. First vol., down to the Baptist's question, 556 pp. Second
+    vol., 617 pp.
+
+
+"My hope is," writes Strauss in concluding the preface of his new Life of
+Jesus, "that I have written a book as thoroughly well adapted for Germans
+as Renan's is for Frenchmen." He was mistaken; in spite of its title the
+book was not a book for the people. It had nothing new to offer, and what
+it did offer was not in a form calculated to become popular. It is true
+Strauss, like Renan, was an artist, but he did not write, like an
+imaginative novelist, with a constant eye to effect. His art was
+unpretentious, even austere, appealing to the few, not to the many. The
+people demand a complete and vivid picture. Renan had given them a figure
+which was theatrical no doubt, but full of life and movement, and they had
+been grateful to him for it. Strauss could not do that.
+
+Even the arrangement of the work is thoroughly unfortunate. In the first
+part, which bears the title "The Life of Jesus," he attempts to combine
+into a harmonious portrait such of the historical data as have some claim
+to be considered historical; in the second part he traces the "Origin and
+Growth of the Mythical History of Jesus." First, therefore, he tears down
+from the tree the ivy and the rich growth of creepers, laying bare the
+worn and corroded bark; then he fastens the faded growths to the stem
+again, and describes the nature, origin, and characteristics of each
+distinct species.
+
+How vastly different, how much more full of life, had been the work of
+1835! There Strauss had not divided the creepers from the stem. The
+straining strength which upheld this wealth of creepers was but vaguely
+suspected. Behind the billowy mists of legend we caught from time to time
+a momentary glimpse of the gigantic figure of Jesus, as though lit up by a
+lightning-flash. It was no complete and harmonious picture, but it was
+full of suggestions, rich in thoughts thrown out carelessly, rich in
+contradictions even, out of which the imagination could create a portrait
+of Jesus. It is just this wealth of suggestion that is lacking in the
+second picture. Strauss is trying now to give a definite portrait. In the
+inevitable process of harmonising and modelling to scale he is obliged to
+reject the finest thoughts of the previous work because they will not fit
+in exactly; some of them are altered out of recognition, some are filed
+away.
+
+There is wanting, too, that perfect freshness as of the spring which is
+only found when thoughts have but newly come into flower. The writing is
+no longer spontaneous; one feels that Strauss is setting forth thoughts
+which have ripened with his mind and grown old with it, and now along with
+their definiteness of form have taken on a certain stiffness. There are
+now no hinted possibilities, full of promise, to dance gaily through the
+movement of his dialectic; all is sober reason--a thought too sober. Renan
+had one advantage over Strauss in that he wrote when the material was
+fresh to him--one might almost say strange to him--and was capable of
+calling up in him the response of vivid feeling.
+
+For a popular book, too, it lacks that living interplay of reflection with
+narration without which the ordinary reader fails to get a grip of the
+history. The first Life of Jesus had been rich in this respect, since it
+had been steeped in the Hegelian theory regarding the realisation of the
+Idea. In the meantime Strauss had seen the Hegelian philosophy fall from
+its high estate, and himself had found no way of reconciling history and
+idea, so that his present Life of Jesus was a mere objective presentment
+of the history. It was, therefore, not adapted to make any impression upon
+the popular mind.
+
+In reality it is merely an exposition, in more or less popular form, of
+the writer's estimate of what had been done in the study of the subject
+during the past thirty years, and shows what he had learnt and what he had
+failed to learn.
+
+As regards the Synoptic question he had learnt nothing. In his opinion the
+criticism of the Gospels has "run to seed." He treats with a pitying
+contempt both the earlier and the more recent defenders of the Marcan
+hypothesis. Weisse is a dilettante; Wilke had failed to make any
+impression on him; Holtzmann's work was as yet unknown to him. But in the
+following year he discharged the vials of his wrath upon the man who had
+both strengthened the foundations and put on the coping-stone of the new
+hypothesis. "Our lions of St. Mark, older and younger," he says in the
+appendix to his criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus, "may roar as
+loud as they like, so long as there are six solid reasons against the
+priority of Mark to set against every one of their flimsy arguments in its
+favour--and they themselves supply us with a store of counter-arguments in
+the shape of admissions of later editing and so forth. The whole theory
+appears to me a temporary aberration, like the 'music of the future' or
+the anti-vaccination movement; and I seriously believe that it is the same
+order of mind which, in different circumstances, falls a victim to the one
+delusion or the other." But he must not be supposed, he says, to take the
+critical mole-hills thrown up by Holtzmann for veritable mountains.
+
+Against such opponents he does not scruple to seek aid from
+Schleiermacher, whose unbiased but decided opinion had ascribed a tertiary
+character to Mark. Even Gfroerer's view that Mark adapted his Gospel to the
+needs of the Church by leaving out everything which was open to objection
+in Matthew and Luke, is good enough to be brought to bear against the bat-
+eyed partisans of Mark. F. C. Baur is reproached for having given too much
+weight to the "tendency" theory in his criticism of the Gospels; and also
+for having taken suggestions of Strauss's and worked them out, supposing
+that he was offering something new when he was really only amplifying. In
+the end he had only given a criticism of the Gospels, not of the Gospel
+history.
+
+But this irritation against his old teacher is immediately allayed when he
+comes to speak of the Fourth Gospel. Here the teacher has carried to a
+successful issue the campaign which the pupil had begun. Strauss feels
+compelled to "express his gratitude for the work done by the Tuebingen
+school on the Johannine question." He himself had only been able to deal
+with the negative side of the question--to show that the Fourth Gospel was
+not an historical source, but a theological invention; they had dealt with
+it positively, and had assigned the document to its proper place in the
+evolution of Christian thought. There is only one point with which he
+quarrels. Baur had made the Fourth Gospel too completely spiritual,
+"whereas the fact is," says Strauss, "that it is the most material of
+all." It is true, Strauss explains, that the Evangelist starts out to
+interpret miracle and eschatology symbolically; but he halts half-way and
+falls back upon the miraculous, enhancing the professed fact in proportion
+as he makes it spiritually more significant. Beside the spiritual return
+of Jesus in the Paraclete he places His return in a material body, bearing
+the marks of the wounds; beside the inward present judgment, a future
+outward judgment; and the fact that he sees the one in the other, finds
+the one present and visible in the other, is just what constitutes the
+mystical character of his Gospel. This mysticism attracts the modern
+world. "The Johannine Christ, who in His descriptions of Himself seems to
+be always out-doing Himself, is the counterpart of the modern believer,
+who in order to remain a believer must continually out-do himself; the
+Johannine miracles which are always being interpreted spiritually, and at
+the same time raised to a higher pitch of the miraculous, which are
+counted and documented in every possible way, and yet must not be
+considered the true ground of faith, are at once miracles and no miracles.
+We must believe them, and yet can believe without them; in short they
+exactly meet the taste of the present day, which delights to involve
+itself in contradictions and is too lethargic and wanting in courage for
+any clear insight or decided opinion on religious matters."
+
+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.
+
+Strauss is not in the least disquieted by finding himself at one with
+Schleiermacher in these attempts to spiritualise. On the contrary, he
+appeals to him. He shares, he says, Schleiermacher's conviction "that the
+unique self-consciousness of Jesus did not develop as a consequence of His
+conviction that He was the Messiah; on the contrary, it was a consequence
+of His self-consciousness that He arrived at the view that the Messianic
+prophecies could point to no one but Himself." The moment eschatology
+entered into the consciousness of Jesus it came in contact with a higher
+principle which over-mastered it and gradually dissolved it. "Had Jesus
+applied the Messianic idea to Himself before He had had a profound
+religious consciousness to which to relate it, doubtless it would have
+taken possession of Him so powerfully that He could never have escaped
+from its influence." We must suppose the ideality, the concentration upon
+that which was inward, the determination to separate religion, on the one
+hand, from politics, and on the other, from ritual, the serene
+consciousness of being able to attain to peace with God and with Himself
+by purely spiritual means--all this we must suppose to have reached a
+certain ripeness, a certain security, in the mind of Jesus, before He
+permitted Himself to entertain the thought of His Messiahship, and this we
+may believe is the reason why He grasped it in so independent and
+individual a fashion. In this, therefore, Strauss has become the pupil of
+Weisse.
+
+Even in the Old Testament prophecies, he explains, we find two
+conceptions, a more ideal and a more practical. Jesus holds consistently
+to the first, He describes Himself as the Son of Man because this
+designation "contains the suggestion of humility and lowliness, of the
+human and natural." At Jerusalem, Jesus, in giving His interpretation of
+Psalm cx., "made merry over the Davidic descent of the Messiah." He
+desired "to be Messiah in the sense of a patient teacher exercising a
+quiet influence." As the opposition of the people grew more intense, He
+took up some of the features of Isaiah liii. into His conception of the
+Messiah.
+
+Of His resurrection, Jesus can only have spoken in a metaphorical sense.
+It is hardly credible that one who was pure man could have arrogated to
+himself the position of judge of the world. Strauss would like best to
+ascribe all the eschatology to the distorting medium of early
+Christianity, but he does not venture to carry this through with logical
+consistency. He takes it as certain, however, that Jesus, even though it
+sometimes seems as if He did not expect the Kingdom to be realised in the
+present, but in a future, world-era, and to be brought about by God in a
+supernatural fashion, nevertheless sets about the establishment of the
+Kingdom by purely spiritual influence.
+
+With this end in view He leaves Galilee, when He judges the time to be
+ripe, in order to work on a larger scale. "In case of an unfavourable
+issue, He reckons on the influence which a martyr-death has never failed
+to exercise in giving momentum to a lofty idea." How far He had advanced,
+when He entered on the fateful journey to Jerusalem, in shaping His plan,
+and especially in organising the company of adherents who had gathered
+about Him, it is impossible to determine with any exactness. He permitted
+the triumphal entry because He did not desire to decline the role of the
+Messiah in every aspect of it.
+
+Owing to this arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptic Jesus, Strauss's
+picture is in essence much more unhistorical than Renan's. The latter had
+not needed to deny that Jesus had done miracles, and he had been able to
+suggest an explanation of how Jesus came in the end to fall back upon the
+eschatological system of ideas. But at what a price! By portraying Jesus
+as at variance with Himself, a hero broken in spirit. This price is too
+high for Strauss. Arbitrary as his treatment of history is, he never loses
+the intuitive feeling that in Jesus' self-consciousness there is a unique
+absence of struggle; that He does not bear the scars which are found in
+those natures which win their way to freedom and purity through strife and
+conflict, that in Him there is no trace of the hardness, harshness, and
+gloom which cleave to such natures throughout life, but that He "is
+manifestly a beautiful nature from the first." Thus, for all Strauss's
+awkward, arbitrary handling of the history he is greater than the
+rival(124) who could manufacture history with such skill.
+
+Nevertheless, from the point of view of theological science, this work
+marks a standstill. That was the net result of the thirty years of
+critical study of the life of Jesus for the man who had inaugurated it so
+impressively. This was the only fruit which followed those blossoms so
+full of promise of the first Life of Jesus.
+
+It is significant that in the same year there appeared Schleiermacher's
+lectures on the Life of Jesus, which had not seen the light for forty
+years, because, as Strauss himself remarked in his criticism of the
+resurrected work, it had neither anodyne nor dressing for the wounds which
+his first Life of Jesus had made.(125) The wounds, however, had cicatrised
+in the meantime. It is true Strauss is a just judge, and makes ample
+acknowledgment of the greatness of Schleiermacher's achievement.(126) He
+blames Schleiermacher for setting up his "presuppositions in regard to
+Christ" as an historical canon, and considering it a proof that a
+statement is unhistorical if it does not square with those
+presuppositions. But does not the purely human, but to a certain extent
+unhistorical, man, who is to be the ultimate product of the process of
+eliminating myth, serve Strauss as his "theoretic Christ" who determines
+the presentment of his historical Jesus? Does he not share with
+Schleiermacher the erroneous, artificial, "double" construction of the
+consciousness of Jesus? And what about their views of Mark? What
+fundamental difference is there, when all is said, between
+Schleiermacher's de-rationalised Life of Jesus and Strauss's? Certainly
+this second Life of Jesus would not have frightened Schleiermacher's away
+into hiding for thirty years.
+
+So Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus might now safely venture forth into the
+light. There was no reason why it should feel itself a stranger at this
+period, and it had no need to be ashamed of itself. Its rationalistic
+birth-marks were concealed by its brilliant dialectic.(127) And the only
+real advance in the meantime was the general recognition that the Life of
+Jesus was not to be interpreted on rationalistic, but on historical lines.
+All other, more definite, historical results had proved more or less
+illusory; there is no vitality in them. The works of Renan, Strauss,
+Schenkel, Weizsaecker, and Keim are in essence only different ways of
+carrying out a single ground-plan. To read them one after another is to be
+simply appalled at the stereotyped uniformity of the world of thought in
+which they move. You feel that you have read exactly the same thing in the
+others, almost in identical phrases. To obtain the works of Schenkel and
+Weizsaecker you only need to weaken down in Strauss the sharp
+discrimination between John and the Synoptists so far as to allow of the
+Fourth Gospel being used to some extent as an historical source "in the
+higher sense," and to put the hypothesis of the priority of Mark in place
+of the Tuebingen view adopted by Strauss. The latter is an external
+operation and does not essentially modify the view of the Life of Jesus,
+since by admitting the Johannine scheme the Marcan plan is again
+disturbed, and Strauss's arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptics comes
+to something not very different from the acceptance of that "in a higher
+sense historical Gospel" alongside of them. The whole discussion regarding
+the sources is only loosely connected with the process of arriving at the
+portrait of Jesus, since this portrait is fixed from the first, being
+determined by the mental atmosphere and religious horizon of the 'sixties.
+They all portray the Jesus of liberal theology; the only difference is
+that one is a little more conscientious in his colouring than another, and
+one perhaps has a little more taste than another, or is less concerned
+about the consequences.
+
+The desire to escape in some way from the alternative between the
+Synoptists and John was native to the Marcan hypothesis. Weisse had
+endeavoured to effect this by distinguishing between the sources in the
+Fourth Gospel.(128) Schenkel and Weizsaecker are more modest. They do not
+feel the need of any clear literary view of the Fourth Gospel, of any
+critical discrimination between original and secondary elements in it;
+they are content to use as historical whatever their instinct leads them
+to accept. "Apart from the fourth Gospel," says Schenkel, "we should miss
+in the portrait of the Redeemer the unfathomable depths and the
+inaccessible heights." "Jesus," to quote his aphorism, "was not always
+thus in reality, but He was so in truth." Since when have historians had
+the right to distinguish between reality and truth? That was one of the
+bad habits which the author of this characterisation of Jesus brought with
+him from his earlier dogmatic training.
+
+Weizsaecker(129) expresses himself with more circumspection. "We possess,"
+he says, "in the Fourth Gospel genuine apostolic reminiscences as much as
+in any part of the first three Gospels; but between the facts on which the
+reminiscences are based and their reproduction in literary form there lies
+the development of their possessor into a great mystic, and the influence
+of a philosophy which here for the first time united itself in this way
+with the Gospel; they need, therefore, to be critically examined; and the
+historical truth of this gospel, great as it is, must not be measured with
+a painful literality."
+
+One wonders why both these writers appeal to Holtzmann, seeing that they
+practically abandon the Marcan plan which he had worked out at the end of
+his very thorough examination of this Gospel. They do not accept as
+sufficient the controversy regarding the ceremonial regulations in Mark
+vii. which, with the rejection at Nazareth, constitute, in Holtzmann's
+view, the turning-point of the Galilaean ministry, but find the cause of
+the change of attitude on the part of the people rather in the Johannine
+discourse about eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the Son of Man.
+The section Mark x.-xv., which has a certain unity, they interpret in the
+light of the Johannine tradition, finding in it traces of a previous
+ministry of Jesus in Jerusalem and interweaving with it the Johannine
+story of the Passion. According to Schenkel the last visit to Jerusalem
+must have been of considerable duration. When confronted with John, the
+admission may be wrung from the Synoptists that Jesus did not travel
+straight through Jericho to the capital, but worked first for a
+considerable time in Judaea. Strauss tartly observes that he cannot see
+what the author of the "characterisation" stood to gain by underwriting
+Holtzmann's Marcan hypothesis.(130)
+
+Weizsaecker is still bolder in making interpolations from the Johannine
+tradition. He places the cleansing of the Temple, in contradiction to
+Mark, in the early period of Jesus' ministry, on the ground that "it bears
+the character of a first appearance, a bold deed with which to open His
+career." He fails to observe, however, that if this act really took place
+at this point of time, the whole development of the life of Jesus which
+Holtzmann had so ingeniously traced in Mark, is at once thrown into
+confusion. In describing the last visit to Jerusalem, Weizsaecker is not
+content to insert the Marcan stones into the Johannine cement; he goes
+farther and expressly states that the great farewell discourses of Jesus
+to His disciples agree with the Synoptic discourses to the disciples
+spoken during the last days, however completely they of all others bear
+the peculiar stamp of the Johannine diction.
+
+Thus in the second period of the Marcan hypothesis the same spectacle
+meets us as in the earlier. The hypothesis has a literary existence,
+indeed it is carried by Holtzmann to such a degree of demonstration that
+it can no longer be called a mere hypothesis, but it does not succeed in
+winning an assured position in the critical study of the Life of Jesus. It
+is common-land not yet taken into cultivation.
+
+That is due in no small measure to the fact that Holtzmann did not work
+out the hypothesis from the historical side, but rather on literary lines,
+recalling Wilke--as a kind of problem in Synoptic arithmetic--and in his
+preface expresses dissent from the Tuebingen school, who desired to leave
+no alternative between John on the one side and the Synoptics on the
+other, whereas he approves the attempt to evade the dilemma in some way or
+other, and thinks he can find in the didactic narrative of the Fourth
+Gospel the traces of a development of Jesus similar to that portrayed in
+the Synoptics, and has therefore no fundamental objection to the use of
+John alongside of the Synoptics. In taking up this position, however, he
+does not desire to be understood as meaning that "it would be to the
+interests of science to throw Synoptic and Johannine passages together
+indiscriminately and thus construct a life of Jesus out of them." "It
+would be much better first to reconstruct separately the Synoptic and
+Johannine pictures of Christ, composing each of its own distinctive
+material. It is only when this has been done that it is possible to make a
+fruitful comparison of the two." Exactly the same position had been taken
+up sixty-seven years before by Herder. In Holtzmann's case, however, the
+principle was stated with so many qualifications that the adherents of his
+view read into it the permission to combine, in a picture treated "in the
+grand style," Synoptic with Johannine passages.
+
+In addition to this, the plan which Holtzmann finally evolved out of Mark
+was much too fine-drawn to bear the weight of the remainder of the
+Synoptic material. He distinguishes seven stages in the Galilaean
+ministry,(131) of which the really decisive one is the sixth, in which
+Jesus leaves Galilee and goes northward, so that Schenkel and Weizsaecker
+are justified in distinguishing practically only two great Galilaean
+periods, the first of which--down to the controversy about ceremonial
+purity--they distinguish as the period of success, the second--down to the
+departure from Judaea--as the period of decline. What attracted these
+writers to the Marcan hypothesis was not so much the authentification
+which it gave to the detail of Mark, though they were willing enough to
+accept that, but the way in which this Gospel lent itself to the a priori
+view of the course of the life of Jesus which they unconsciously brought
+with them. They appealed to Holtzmann because he showed such wonderful
+skill in extracting from the Marcan narrative the view which commended
+itself to the spirit of the age as manifested in the 'sixties.
+
+Holtzmann read into this Gospel that Jesus had endeavoured in Galilee to
+found the Kingdom of God in an ideal sense; that He concealed His
+consciousness of being the Messiah, which was constantly growing more
+assured, until His followers should have attained by inner enlightenment
+to a higher view of the Kingdom of God and of the Messiah; that almost at
+the end of His Galilaean ministry He declared Himself to them as the
+Messiah at Caesarea Philippi; that on the same occasion He at once began
+to picture to them a suffering Messiah, whose lineaments gradually became
+more and more distinct in His mind amid the growing opposition which He
+encountered, until finally, He communicated to His disciples His decision
+to put the Messianic cause to the test in the capital, and that they
+followed Him thither and saw how His fate fulfilled itself. It was this
+fundamental view which made the success of the hypothesis. Holtzmann, not
+less than his followers, believed that he had discovered it in the Gospel
+itself, although Strauss, the passionate opponent of the Marcan
+hypothesis, took essentially the same view of the development of Jesus'
+thought. But the way in which Holtzmann exhibited this characteristic view
+of the 'sixties as arising naturally out of the detail of Mark, was so
+perfect, so artistically charming, that this view appeared henceforward to
+be inseparably bound up with the Marcan tradition. Scarcely ever has a
+description of the life of Jesus exercised so irresistible an influence as
+that short outline--it embraces scarcely twenty pages--with which Holtzmann
+closes his examination of the Synoptic Gospels. This chapter became the
+creed and catechism of all who handled the subject during the following
+decades. The treatment of the life of Jesus had to follow the lines here
+laid down until the Marcan hypothesis was delivered from its bondage to
+that a priori view of the development of Jesus. Until then any one might
+appeal to the Marcan hypothesis, meaning thereby only that general view of
+the inward and outward course of development in the life of Jesus, and
+might treat the remainder of the Synoptic material how he chose, combining
+with it, at his pleasure, material drawn from John. The victory,
+therefore, belonged, not to the Marcan hypothesis pure and simple, but to
+the Marcan hypothesis as psychologically interpreted by a liberal
+theology.
+
+The points of distinction between the Weissian and the new interpretation
+are as follows:--Weisse is sceptical as regards the detail; the new Marcan
+hypothesis ventures to base conclusions even upon incidental remarks in
+the text. According to Weisse there were not distinct periods of success
+and failure in the ministry of Jesus; the new Marcan hypothesis
+confidently affirms this distinction, and goes so far as to place the
+sojourn of Jesus in the parts beyond Galilee under the heading "Flights
+and Retirements."(132) The earlier Marcan hypothesis expressly denies that
+outward circumstances influenced the resolve of Jesus to die; according to
+the later, it was the opposition of the people, and the impossibility of
+carrying out His mission on other lines which forced Him to enter on the
+path of suffering.(133) The Jesus of Weisse's view has completed His
+development at the time of His appearance; the Jesus of the new
+interpretation of Mark continues to develop in the course of His public
+ministry.
+
+There is complete agreement, however, in the rejection of eschatology. For
+Holtzmann, Schenkel, and Weizsaecker, as for Weisse, Jesus desires "to
+found an inward kingdom of repentance."(134) It was Israel's duty,
+according to Schenkel, to believe in the presence of the Kingdom which
+Jesus proclaimed. John the Baptist was unable to believe in it, and it was
+for this reason that Jesus censured him--for it is in this sense that
+Schenkel understands the saying about the greatest among those born of
+women who is nevertheless the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. "So near the
+light and yet shutting his eyes to its beams--is there not some blame here,
+an undeniable lack of spiritual and moral receptivity?"
+
+Jesus makes Messianic claims only in a spiritual sense. He does not grasp
+at super-human glory; it is His purpose to bear the sin of the whole
+people, and He undergoes baptism "as a humble member of the national
+community."
+
+His whole teaching consists, when once He Himself has attained to clear
+consciousness of His vocation, in a constant struggle to root out from the
+hearts of His disciples their theocratic hopes and to effect a
+transformation of their traditional Messianic ideas. When, on Simon's
+hailing Him as the Messiah, He declares that flesh and blood has not
+revealed it to him, He means, according to Schenkel, "that Simon has at
+this moment overcome the false Messianic ideas, and has recognised in Him
+the ethical and spiritual deliverer of Israel."
+
+"That Jesus predicted a personal, bodily, Second Coming, in the brightness
+of His heavenly splendour and surrounded by the heavenly hosts, to
+establish an earthly kingdom, is not only not proved, it is absolutely
+impossible." His purpose is to establish a community of which His
+disciples are to be the foundation, and by means of this community to
+bring about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He can, therefore, only have
+spoken of His return as an impersonal return in the Spirit. The later
+exponents of the Marcan view were no doubt generally inclined to regard
+the return as personal and corporeal. For Schenkel, however, it is
+historically certain that the real meaning of the eschatological
+discourses is more faithfully preserved in the Fourth Gospel than in the
+Synoptics.
+
+In his anxiety to eliminate any enthusiastic elements from the
+representation of Jesus, he ends by drawing a bourgeois Messiah whom he
+might have extracted from the old-fashioned rationalistic work of the
+worthy Reinhard. He feels bound to save the credit of Jesus by showing
+that the entry into Jerusalem was not intended as a provocation to the
+government. "It is only by making this supposition," he explains, "that we
+avoid casting a slur upon the character of Jesus. It was certainly a
+constant trait in His character that He never unnecessarily exposed
+Himself to danger, and never, except for the most pressing reasons, did He
+give any support to the suspicions which were arising against Him; He
+avoided provoking His opponents to drastic measures by any overt act
+directed against them." Even the cleansing of the Temple was not an act of
+violence but merely an attempt at reform.
+
+Schenkel is able to give these explanations because he knows the most
+secret thoughts of Jesus and is therefore no longer bound to the text. He
+knows, for example, that immediately after His baptism He attained to the
+knowledge "that the way of the Law was no longer the way of salvation for
+His people." Jesus cannot therefore have uttered the saying about the
+permanence of the Law in Mark v. 18. In the controversies about the
+Sabbath "He proclaims freedom of worship."
+
+As time went on, He began to take the heathen world into the scope of His
+purpose. "The hard saying addressed to the Canaanite woman represents
+rather the proud and exclusive spirit of Pharisaism than the spirit of
+Jesus." It was a test of faith, the success of which had a decisive
+influence upon Jesus' attitude towards the heathen. Henceforth it is
+obvious that He is favourably disposed towards them. He travels through
+Samaria and establishes a community there. In Jerusalem He openly calls
+the heathen to Him. At certain feasts which they had arranged for that
+purpose, some of the leaders of the people set a trap for Him, and
+betrayed Him into liberal sayings in regard to the Gentiles which sealed
+His fate.
+
+This was the course of development of the Master, who, according to
+Schenkel, "saw with a clear eye into the future history of the world," and
+knew that the fall of Jerusalem must take place in order to close the
+theocratic era and give the Gentiles free access to the universal
+community of Christians which He was to found. "This period He described
+as the period of His coming, as in a sense His Second Advent upon earth."
+
+The same general procedure is followed by Weizsaecker in his "Gospel
+History," though his work is of a much higher quality than Schenkel's. His
+account of the sources is one of the clearest that has ever been written.
+In the description of the life of Jesus, however, the unhesitating
+combination of material from the Fourth Gospel with that of the Synoptics
+rather confuses the picture. And whereas Renan only offers the results of
+the completed process, Weizsaecker works out his, it might almost be said,
+under the eyes of the reader, which makes the arbitrary character of the
+proceeding only the more obvious. But in his attitude towards the sources
+Weizsaecker is wholly free from the irresponsible caprice in which Schenkel
+indulges. From time to time, too, he gives a hint of unsolved problems in
+the background. For example, in treating of the declaration of Jesus to
+His judges that He would come as the Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven,
+he remarks how surprising it is that Jesus could so often have used the
+designation Son of Man on earlier occasions without being accused of
+claiming the Messiahship. It is true that this is a mere scraping of the
+keel upon a sandbank, by which the steersman does not allow himself to be
+turned from his course, for Weizsaecker concludes that the name Son of Man,
+in spite of its use in Daniel, "had not become a generally current or
+really popular designation of the Messiah." But even this faint suspicion
+of the difficulty is a welcome sign. Much emphasis, in fact, in practice
+rather too much emphasis, is laid on the principle that in the great
+discourses of Jesus the structure is not historical; they are only
+collections of sayings formed to meet the needs of the Christian community
+in later times. In this Weizsaecker is sometimes not less arbitrary than
+Schenkel, who represents the Lord's Prayer as given by Jesus to the
+disciples only in the last days at Jerusalem. It was an axiom of the
+school that Jesus could not have delivered discourses such as the
+Evangelists record.
+
+If Schenkel's picture of Jesus' character attracted much more attention
+than Weizsaecker's work, that is mainly due to the art of lively popular
+presentation by which it is distinguished. The writer knows well how to
+keep the reader's interest awake by the use of exciting headlines.
+Catchwords abound, and arrest the ear, for they are the catchwords about
+which the religious controversies of the time revolved. There is never far
+to look for the moral of the history, and the Jesus here portrayed can be
+imagined plunging into the midst of the debates in any ministerial
+conference. The moralising, it must be admitted, sometimes becomes the
+occasion of the feeblest ineptitudes. Jesus sent out His disciples two and
+two; this is for Schenkel a marvellous exhibition of wisdom. The Lord
+designed, thereby, to show that in His opinion "nothing is more inimical
+to the interests of the Kingdom of God than individualism, self-will,
+self-pleasing." Schenkel entirely fails to recognise the superb irony of
+the saying that in this life all that a man gives up for the sake of the
+Kingdom of God is repaid a hundredfold in persecutions, in order that in
+the Coming Age he may receive eternal life as his reward. He interpreted
+it as meaning that the sufferer shall be compensated by love; his fellow-
+Christians will endeavour to make it up to him, and will offer him their
+own possessions so freely that, in consequence of this brotherly love, he
+will soon have, for the house which he has lost, a hundred houses, for the
+lost sisters, brothers, and so forth, a hundred sisters, a hundred
+brothers, a hundred fathers, a hundred mothers, a hundred farms. Schenkel
+forgets to add that, if this is to be the interpretation of the saying,
+the persecuted man must also receive through this compensating love, a
+hundred wives.(135)
+
+This want of insight into the largeness, the startling originality, the
+self-contradictoriness, and the terrible irony in the thought of Jesus, is
+not a peculiarity of Schenkel's; it is characteristic of all the liberal
+Lives of Jesus from Strauss's down to Oskar Holtzmann's.(136) How could it
+be otherwise? They had to transpose a way of envisaging the world which
+belonged to a hero and a dreamer to the plane of thought of a rational
+bourgeois religion. But in Schenkel's representation, with its popular
+appeal, this banality is particularly obtrusive.
+
+In the end, however, what made the success of the book was not its popular
+characteristics, whether good or bad, but the enmity which it drew down
+upon the author. The Basle Privat-Docent who, in his work of 1839, had
+congratulated the Zurichers on having rejected Strauss, now, as Professor
+and Director of the Seminary at Heidelberg, came very near being adjudged
+worthy of the martyr's crown himself. He had been at Heidelberg since
+1851, after holding for a short time De Wette's chair at Basle. At his
+first coming a mildly reactionary theology might have claimed him as its
+own. He gave it a right to do so by the way in which he worked against the
+philosopher, Kuno Fischer, in the Higher Consistory. But in the struggles
+over the constitution of the Church he changed his position. As a defender
+of the rights of the laity he ranged himself on the more liberal side.
+After his great victory in the General Synod of 1861, in which the new
+constitution of the Church was established, he called a German Protestant
+assembly at Frankfort, in order to set on foot a general movement for
+Church reform. This assembly met in 1863, and led to the formation of the
+Protestant Association.
+
+When the _Charakterbild Jesu_ appeared, friend and foe were alike
+surprised at the thoroughness with which Schenkel advocated the more
+liberal views. "Schenkel's book," complained Luthardt, in a lecture at
+Leipzig,(137) "has aroused a painful interest. We had learnt to know him
+in many aspects; we were not prepared for such an apostasy from his own
+past. How long is it since he brought about the dismissal of Kuno Fischer
+from Heidelberg because he saw in the pantheism of this philosopher a
+danger to Church and State? It is still fresh in our memory that it was he
+who in the year 1852 drew up the report of the Theological Faculty of
+Heidelberg upon the ecclesiastical controversy raised by Pastor Duelon at
+Bremen, in which he denied Duelon's Christianity on the ground that he had
+assailed the doctrines of original sin, of justification by faith, of a
+living and personal God, of the eternal Divine Sonship of Christ, of the
+Kingdom of God, and of the credibility of the holy Scriptures." And now
+this same Schenkel was misusing the Life of Jesus as a weapon in "party
+polemics"!
+
+The agitation against him was engineered from Berlin, where his successful
+attack upon the illiberal constitution of the Church had not been
+forgiven. One hundred and seventeen Baden clerics signed a protest
+declaring the author unfitted to hold office as a theological teacher in
+the Baden Church. Throughout the whole of Germany the pastors agitated
+against him. It was especially demanded that he should be immediately
+removed from his post as Director of the Seminary. A counter-protest was
+issued by the Durlach Conference in the July of 1864, in which Bluntschli
+and Holtzmann vigorously defended him. The Ecclesiastical Council
+supported him, and the storm gradually died away, especially when Schenkel
+in two "Defences" skilfully softened down the impression made by his work,
+and endeavoured to quiet the public mind by pointing out that he had only
+attempted to set forth one side of the truth.(138)
+
+The position of the prospective martyr was not rendered any more easy by
+Strauss. In an appendix to his criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus
+he settled accounts with his old antagonist.(139) He recognises no
+scientific value whatever in the work. None of the ideas developed in it
+are new. One might fairly say, he thinks, "that the conclusions which have
+given offence had been carried down the Neckar from Tuebingen to
+Heidelberg, and had there been salvaged by Herr Schenkel--in a somewhat
+sodden and deteriorated condition, it must be admitted--and incorporated
+into the edifice which he was constructing." Further, Strauss censures the
+book for its want of frankness, its half-and-half character, which
+manifests itself especially in the way in which the author clings to
+orthodox phraseology. "Over and over again he gives criticism with one
+hand all that it can possibly ask, and then takes back with the other
+whatever the interests of faith seem to demand; with the constant result
+that what is taken back is far too much for criticism and not nearly
+enough for faith." "In the future," he concludes, "it will be said of the
+seven hundred Durlachers that they fought like paladins to prevent the
+enemy from capturing a standard which was really nothing but a patched
+dish-clout."
+
+Schenkel died in 1885 after severe sufferings. As a critic he lacked
+independence, and was, therefore, always inclined to compromises; in
+controversy he was vehement. Though he did nothing remarkable in theology,
+German Protestantism owes him a vast debt for acting as its tribune in the
+'sixties.
+
+That was the last time that any popular excitement was aroused in
+connexion with the critical study of the life of Jesus; and it was a mere
+storm in a tea-cup. Moreover, it was the man and not his work that aroused
+the excitement. Henceforth public opinion was almost entirely indifferent
+to anything which appeared in this department. The great fundamental
+question whether historical criticism was to be applied to the life of
+Jesus had been decided in connexion with Strauss's first work on the
+subject. If here and there indignation aroused by a Life of Jesus brought
+inconveniences to the author and profit to the publisher, that was
+connected in every case with purely external and incidental circumstances.
+Public opinion was not disquieted for a moment by Volkmar and Wrede,
+although they are much more extreme than Schenkel.
+
+Most of the Lives of Jesus which followed had, it is true, nothing very
+exciting about them. They were mere variants of the type established
+during the 'sixties, variants of which the minute differences were only
+discernible by theologians, and which were otherwise exactly alike in
+arrangement and result. As a contribution to criticism, Keim's(140)
+"History of Jesus of Nazara" was the most important Life of Jesus which
+appeared in a long period.
+
+It is not of much consequence that he believes in the priority of Matthew,
+since his presentment of the history follows the general lines of the
+Marcan plan, which is preserved also in Matthew. He gives it as his
+opinion that the life of Jesus is to be reconstructed from the Synoptics,
+whether Matthew has the first place or Mark. He sketches the development
+of Jesus in bold lines. As early as his inaugural address at Zurich,
+delivered on the 17th of December 1860, which, short as it was, made a
+powerful impression upon Holtzmann as well as upon others, he had set up
+the thesis that the Synoptics "artlessly, almost against their will, show
+us unconsciously in incidental, unobtrusive traits the progressive
+development of Jesus as youth and man."(141) His later works are the
+development of this sketch.
+
+His grandiose style gave the keynote for the artistic treatment of the
+portrait of Jesus in the 'sixties. His phrases and expressions became
+classical. Every one follows him in speaking of the "Galilaean spring-
+tide" in the ministry of Jesus.
+
+On the Johannine question he takes up a clearly defined position, denying
+the possibility of using the Fourth Gospel side by side with the Synoptics
+as an historical source. He goes very far in finding special significance
+in the details of the Synoptists, especially when he is anxious to
+discover traces of want of success in the second period of Jesus'
+ministry, since the plan of his Life of Jesus depends on the sharp
+antithesis between the periods of success and failure. The whole of the
+second half of the Galilaean period consists for him in "flights and
+retirements." "Beset by constantly renewed alarms and hindrances, Jesus
+left the scene of His earlier work, left His dwelling-place at Capernaum,
+and accompanied only by a few faithful followers, in the end only by the
+Twelve, sought in all directions for places of refuge for longer or
+shorter periods, in order to avoid and elude His enemies." Keim frankly
+admits, indeed, that there is not a syllable in the Gospels to suggest
+that these journeys are the journeys of a fugitive. But instead of
+allowing that to shake his conviction, he abuses the narrators and
+suggests that they desired to conceal the truth. "These flights," he says,
+"were no doubt inconvenient to the Evangelists. Matthew is here the
+frankest, but in order to restore the impression of Jesus' greatness he
+transfers to this period the greatest miracles. The later Evangelists are
+almost completely silent about these retirements, and leave us to suppose
+that Jesus made His journeys to Caesarea Philippi and the neighbourhood of
+Tyre and Sidon in the middle of winter from mere pleasure in travel, or
+for the extension of the Gospel, and that He made His last journey to
+Jerusalem without any external necessity, entirely in consequence of His
+free decision, even though the expectation of death which they ascribe to
+Him goes far to counteract the impression of complete freedom." Why do
+they thus correct the history? "The motive was the same difficulty which
+draws from us also the question, 'Is it possible that Jesus should
+flee?' " Keim answers "Yes." Here the liberal psychology comes clearly to
+light. "Jesus fled," he explains, "because He desired to preserve Himself
+for God and man, to secure the continuance of His ministry to Israel, to
+defeat as long as possible the dark designs of His enemies, to carry His
+cause to Jerusalem, and there, while acting, as it was His duty to do,
+with prudence and foresight in his relations with men, to recognise
+clearly, by the Divine silence or the Divine action, what the Divine
+purpose really was, which could not be recognised in a moment. He acts
+like a man who knows the duty both of examination and action, who knows
+His own worth and what is due to Him and His obligations towards God and
+man."(142)
+
+In regard to the question of eschatology, however, Keim does justice to
+the texts.(143) He admits that eschatology, "a Kingdom of God clothed with
+material splendours," forms an integral part of the preaching of Jesus
+from the first; "that He never rejected it, and therefore never by a so-
+called advance transformed the sensuous Messianic idea into a purely
+spiritual one." "Jesus does not uproot from the minds of the sons of
+Zebedee their belief in the thrones on His right hand and His left; He
+does not hesitate to make His entry into Jerusalem in the character of the
+Messiah; He acknowledges His Messiahship before the Council without making
+any careful reservations; upon the cross His title is The King of the
+Jews; He consoles Himself and His followers with the thought of His return
+as an earthly ruler, and leaves with His disciples, without making any
+attempt to check it, the belief, which long survived, in a future
+establishment or restoration of the Kingdom in an Israel delivered from
+bondage." Keim remarks with much justice "that Strauss had been wrong in
+rejecting his own earlier and more correct formula," which combined the
+eschatological and spiritual elements as operating side by side in the
+plan of Jesus.
+
+Keim, however, himself in the end allows the spiritual elements
+practically to cancel the eschatological. He admits, it is true, that the
+expression Son of Man which Jesus uses designated the Messiah in the sense
+of Daniel's prophecy, but he thinks that these pictorial representations
+in Daniel did not repel Jesus because He interpreted them spiritually, and
+"intended to describe Himself as belonging to mankind even in His
+Messianic office." To solve the difficulty Keim assumes a development.
+Jesus' consciousness of His vocation had been strengthened both by success
+and by disappointment. As time went on He preached the Kingdom not as a
+future Kingdom, as at first, but as one which was present in Him and with
+Him, and He declares His Messiahship more and more openly before the
+world. He thinks of the Kingdom as undergoing development, but not with an
+unlimited, infinite horizon as the moderns suppose; the horizon is bounded
+by the eschatology. "For however easy it may be to read modern ideas into
+the parables of the draught of fishes, the mustard seed and the leaven,
+which, taken by themselves, seem to suggest the duration contemplated by
+the modern view, it is nevertheless indubitable that Jesus, like Paul, by
+no means looks forward to so protracted an earthly development; on the
+contrary, nothing appears more clearly from the sources than that He
+thought of its term as rapidly approaching, and of His victory as nigh at
+hand; and looked to the last decisive events, even to the day of judgment,
+as about to occur during the lifetime of the existing generation,
+including Himself and His apostles." "It was the overmastering pressure of
+circumstances which held Him prisoner within the limitations of this
+obsolete belief." When His confidence in the development of His Kingdom
+came into collision with barriers which He could not pass, when His belief
+in the presence of the Kingdom of God grew dim, the purely eschatological
+ideas won the upper hand, "and if we may suppose that it was precisely
+this thought of the imminent decisive action of God, taking possession of
+His mind with renewed force at this point, which steeled His human
+courage, and roused Him to a passion of self-sacrifice with the hope of
+saving from the judgment whatever might still be saved, we may welcome His
+adoption of these narrower ideas as in accordance with the goodwill of
+God, which could only by this means maintain the failing strength of its
+human instrument and secure the spoils of the Divine warfare--the souls of
+men subdued and conquered by Him."
+
+The thought which had hovered before the mind of Renan, but which in his
+hands had become only the motive of a romance--_une ficelle de roman_ as
+the French express it--was realised by Keim. Nothing deeper or more
+beautiful has since been written about the development of Jesus.
+
+Less critical in character is Hase's "History of Jesus,"(144) which
+superseded in 1876 the various editions of the Handbook on the Life of
+Jesus which had first appeared in 1829.
+
+The question of the use of John's Gospel side by side with the Synoptics
+he leaves in suspense, and speaks his last word on the subject in the form
+of a parable. "If I may be allowed to use an avowedly parabolic form of
+speech, the relation of Jesus to the two streams of Gospel tradition may
+be illustrated as follows. Once there appeared upon earth a heavenly
+Being. According to His first three biographers He goes about more or less
+incognito, in the long garment of a Rabbi, a forceful popular figure,
+somewhat Judaic in speech, only occasionally, almost unmarked by His
+biographers, pointing with a smile beyond this brief interlude to His
+home. In the description left by His favourite disciple, He has thrown off
+the _talar_ of the Rabbi, and stands before us in His native character,
+but in bitter and angry strife with those who took offence at His
+magnificent simplicity, and then later--it must be confessed, more
+attractively--in deep emotion at parting with those whom, during His
+pilgrimage on earth, He had made His friends, though they did not rightly
+understand His strange, unearthly speech."
+
+This is Hase's way, always to avoid a final decision. The fifty years of
+critical study of the subject which he had witnessed and taken part in had
+made him circumspect, sometimes almost sceptical. But his notes of
+interrogation do not represent a covert supernaturalism like those in the
+Life of Jesus of 1829. Hase had been penetrated by the influence of
+Strauss and had adopted from him the belief that the true life of Jesus
+lies beyond the reach of criticism. "It is not my business," he says to
+his students in an introductory lecture, "to recoil in horror from this or
+that thought, or to express it with embarrassment as being dangerous; I
+would not forbid even the enthusiasm of doubt and destruction which makes
+Strauss so strong and Renan so seductive."
+
+It is left uncertain whether Jesus' consciousness of His Messiahship
+reaches back to the days of His childhood, or whether it arose in the
+ethical development of His ripening manhood. The concealment of His
+Messianic claims is ascribed, as by Schenkel and others, to paedagogic
+motives; it was necessary that Jesus should first educate the people and
+the disciples up to a higher ethical view of His office. In the stress
+which he lays upon the eschatology Hase has points of affinity with Keim,
+for whom he had prepared the way in his Life of Jesus of 1829, in which he
+had been the first to assert a development in Jesus in the course of which
+He at first fully shared the Jewish eschatological views, but later
+advanced to a more spiritual conception. In his Life of Jesus of 1876 he
+is prepared to make the eschatology the dominant feature in the last
+period also, and does not hesitate to represent Jesus as dying in the
+enthusiastic expectation of returning upon the clouds of heaven. He feels
+himself driven to this by the eschatological ideas in the last discourses.
+"Jesus' clear and definite sayings," he declares, "with the whole context
+of the circumstances in which they were spoken and understood, have been
+forcing me to this conclusion for years past."
+
+"That lofty Messianic dream must therefore continue to hold its place,
+since Jesus, influenced as much by the idea of the Messianic glories taken
+over from the beliefs of His people as by His own religious exaltation,
+could not think of the victory of His Kingdom except as closely connected
+with His own personal action. But that was only a misunderstanding due to
+the unconscious poesy of a high-ranging religious imagination, the ethical
+meaning of which could only be realised by a long historical development.
+Christ certainly came again as the greatest power on earth, and His power,
+along with His word, is constantly judging the world. He faced the
+sufferings which lay immediately before Him with His eyes fixed upon this
+great future."
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+The chief excellence of Beyschlag's Life of Jesus consists in its
+arrangement.(145) He first, in the volume of preliminary investigations,
+discusses the problems, so that the narrative is disencumbered of all
+explanations, and by virtue of the author's admirable style becomes a pure
+work of art, which rivets the interest of the reader and almost causes the
+want of a consistent historical conception to be overlooked. The fact is,
+however, that in regard to the two decisive questions Beyschlag is
+deliberately inconsistent. Although he recognises that the Gospel of John
+has not the character of an essentially historical source, "being, rather,
+a brilliant subjective portrait," "a didactic, quite as much as an
+historical work," he produces his Life of Jesus by "combining and
+mortising together Synoptic and Johannine elements." The same uncertainty
+prevails in regard to the recognition of the definitely eschatological
+character of Jesus' system of ideas. Beyschlag gives a very large place to
+eschatology, so that in order to combine the spiritual with the
+eschatological view his Jesus has to pass through three stages of
+development. In the first He preaches the Kingdom as something future, a
+supernatural event which was to be looked forward to, much as the Baptist
+preached it. Then the response which was called forth on all hands by His
+preaching led Him to believe that the Kingdom was in some sense already
+present, "that the Father, while He delays the outward manifestation of
+the Kingdom, is causing it to come even now in quiet and unnoticed ways by
+a humble gradual growth, and the great thought of His parables, which
+dominates the whole middle period of His public life, the resemblance of
+the Kingdom to mustard seed or leaven, comes to birth in His mind." As His
+failure becomes more and more certain, "the centre of gravity of His
+thought is shifted to the world beyond the grave, and the picture of a
+glorious return to conquer and to judge the world rises before Him."
+
+The peculiar interweaving of Synoptic and Johannine ideas leads to the
+result that, between the two, Beyschlag in the end forms no clear
+conception of the eschatology, and makes Jesus think in a half-Johannine,
+half-Synoptic fashion. "It is a consequence of Jesus' profound conception
+of the Kingdom of God as something essentially growing that He regards its
+final perfection not as a state of rest, but rather as a living movement,
+as a process of becoming, and since He regards this process as a cosmic
+and supernatural process in which history finds its consummation, and yet
+as arising entirely out of the ethical and historical process, He combines
+elements from each into the same prophetic conception." An eschatology of
+this kind is not matter for history.
+
+In the acceptance of the "miracles" Beyschlag goes to the utmost limits
+allowed by criticism; in considering the possibility of one or another of
+the recorded raisings from the dead he even finds himself within the
+borders of rationalist territory.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Whether Bernhard Weiss's(146) is to be numbered with the liberal Lives of
+Jesus is a question to which we may answer "Yes; but along with the faults
+of these it has some others in addition." Weiss shares with the authors of
+the liberal "Lives" the assumption that Mark designed to set forth a
+definite "view of the course of development of the public ministry of
+Jesus," and on the strength of that believes himself justified in giving a
+very far-reaching significance to the details offered by this Evangelist.
+The arbitrariness with which he carries out this theory is quite as
+unbounded as Schenkel's, and in his fondness for the "argument from
+silence" he even surpasses him. Although Mark never allows a single word
+to escape him about the motives of the northern journeys, Weiss is so
+clever at reading between the lines that the motives are "quite
+sufficiently" clear to him. The object of these journeys was, according to
+his explanation, "that the people might have an opportunity, undistracted
+by the immediate impression of His words and actions, to make up their
+minds in regard to the questions which they had put to Him so pressingly
+and inescapably in the last days of His public ministry; they must
+themselves draw their own conclusions alike from the declarations and from
+the conduct of Jesus. Only by Jesus' removing Himself for a time from
+their midst could they come to a clear decision as to their attitude to
+Jesus." This modern psychologising, however, is closely combined with a
+dialectic which seeks to show that there is no irreconcilable opposition
+between the belief in the Son of God and Son of Man which the Church of
+Christ has always confessed, and a critical investigation of the question
+how far the details of His life have been accurately preserved by
+tradition, and how they are to be historically interpreted. That means
+that Weiss is going to cover up the difficulties and stumbling-blocks with
+the mantle of Christian charity which he has woven out of the most
+plausible of the traditional sophistries. As a dialectical performance on
+these lines his Life of Jesus rivals in importance any except
+Schleiermacher's. On points of detail there are many interesting
+historical observations. When all is said, one can only regret that so
+much knowledge and so much ability have been expended in the service of so
+hopeless a cause.
+
+What was the net result of these liberal Lives of Jesus? In the first
+place the clearing up of the relation between John and the Synoptics. That
+seems surprising, since the chief representatives of this school,
+Holtzmann, Schenkel, Weizsaecker, and Hase, took up a mediating position on
+this question, not to speak of Beyschlag and Weiss, for whom the
+possibility of reconciliation between the two lines of tradition is an
+accepted datum for ecclesiastical and apologetic reasons. But the very
+attempt to hold the position made clear its inherent untenability. The
+defence of the combination of the two traditions exhausted itself in the
+efforts of these its critical champions, just as the acceptance of the
+supernatural in history exhausted itself in the--to judge from the approval
+of the many--victorious struggle against Strauss. In the course of time
+Weizsaecker, like Holtzmann,(147) advanced to the rejection of any
+possibility of reconciliation, and gave up the Fourth Gospel as an
+historical source. The second demand of Strauss's first Life of Jesus was
+now--at last--conceded by scientific criticism.
+
+That does not mean, of course, that no further attempts at reconciliation
+appeared thenceforward. Was ever a street so closed by a cordon that one
+or two isolated individuals did not get through? And to dodge through
+needs, after all, no special intelligence, or special courage. Must we
+never speak of a victory so long as a single enemy remains alive?
+Individual attempts to combine John with the Synoptics which appeared
+after this decisive point are in some cases deserving of special
+attention, as for example, Wendt's(148) acute study of the "Teaching of
+Jesus," which has all the importance of a full treatment of the "Life."
+But the very way in which Wendt grapples with his task shows that the main
+issue is already decided. All he can do is to fight a skilful and
+determined rearguard action. It is not the Fourth Gospel as it stands, but
+only a "ground-document" on which it is based, which he, in common with
+Weiss, Alexander Schweizer, and Renan, would have to be recognised
+"alongside of the Gospel of Mark and the Logia of Matthew as an
+historically trustworthy tradition regarding the teaching of Jesus," and
+which may be used along with those two writings in forming a picture of
+the Life of Jesus. For Wendt there is no longer any question of an
+interweaving and working up together of the individual sections of John
+and the Synoptists. He takes up much the same standpoint as Holtzmann
+occupied in 1863, but he provides a much more comprehensive and well-
+tested basis for it.
+
+In the end there is no such very great difference between Wendt and the
+writers who had advanced to the conviction of the irreconcilability of the
+two traditions. Wendt refuses to give up the Fourth Gospel altogether;
+they, on their part, won only a half victory because they did not as a
+matter of fact escape from the Johannine interpretation of the Synoptics.
+By means of their psychological interpretation of the first three Gospels
+they make for themselves an ideal Fourth Gospel, in the interests of which
+they reject the existing Fourth Gospel. They will hear nothing of the
+spiritualised Johannine Christ, and refuse to acknowledge even to
+themselves that they have only deposed Him in order to put in His place a
+spiritualised Synoptic Jesus Christ, that is, a man who claimed to be the
+Messiah, but in a spiritual sense. All the development which they discover
+in Jesus is in the last analysis only an evidence of the tension between
+the Synoptics, in their natural literal sense, and the "Fourth Gospel"
+which is extracted from them by an artificial interpretation.
+
+The fact is, the separation between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel is
+only the first step to a larger result which necessarily follows from
+it--the complete recognition of the fundamentally eschatological character
+of the teaching and influence of the Marcan and Matthaean Jesus. Inasmuch
+as they suppressed this consequence, Holtzmann, Schenkel, Hase, and
+Weizsaecker, even after their critical conversion, still lay under the
+spell of the Fourth Gospel, of a modern, ideal Fourth Gospel. It is only
+when the eschatological question is decided that the problem of the
+relation of John to the Synoptics is finally laid to rest. The liberal
+Lives of Jesus grasped their incompatibility only from a literary point of
+view, not in its full historical significance.
+
+There is another result in the acceptance of which the critical school had
+stopped half-way. If the Marcan plan be accepted, it follows that, setting
+aside the references to the Son of Man in Mark ii. 10 and 28, Jesus had
+never, previous to the incident at Caesarea Philippi, given Himself out to
+be the Messiah or been recognised as such. The perception of this fact
+marks one of the greatest advances in the study of the subject. This
+result, once accepted, ought necessarily to have suggested two questions:
+in the first place, why Jesus down to that moment had made a secret of His
+Messiahship even to His disciples; in the second place, whether at any
+time, and, if so, when and how, the people were made acquainted with His
+Messianic claims. As a fact, however, by the application of that ill-
+starred psychologising both questions were smothered; that is to say, a
+sham answer was given to them. It was regarded as self-evident that Jesus
+had concealed His Messiahship from His disciples for so long in order in
+the meantime to bring them, without their being aware of it, to a higher
+spiritual conception of the Messiah; it was regarded as equally self-
+evident that in the last weeks the Messianic claims of Jesus could no
+longer be hidden from the people, but that He did not openly avow them,
+but merely allowed them to be divined, in order to lead up the multitude
+to the recognition of the higher spiritual character of the office which
+He claimed for Himself. These ingenious psychologists never seemed to
+perceive that there is not a word of all this in Mark; but that they had
+read it all into some of the most contradictory and inexplicable facts in
+the Gospels, and had thus created a Messiah who both wished to be Messiah
+and did not wish it, and who in the end, so far as the people were
+concerned, both was and was not the Messiah. Thus these writers had only
+recognised the importance of the scene at Caesarea Philippi, they had not
+ventured to attack the general problem of Jesus' attitude in regard to the
+Messiahship, and had not reflected further on the mutually contradictory
+facts that Jesus purposed to be the Messiah and yet did not come forward
+publicly in that character.
+
+Thus they had side-tracked the study of the subject, and based all their
+hopes of progress on an intensive exegesis of the detail of Mark. They
+thought they had nothing to do but to occupy a conquered territory, and
+never suspected that along the whole line they had only won a half
+victory, never having thought out to the end either the eschatological
+question or the fundamental historical question of the attitude of Jesus
+to the Messiahship.
+
+They were not disquieted by the obstinate persistence of the discussion on
+the eschatological question. They thought it was merely a skirmish with a
+few unorganised guerrillas; in reality it was the advance-guard of the
+army with which Reimarus was threatening their flank, and which under the
+leadership of Johannes Weiss was to bring them to so dangerous a pass. And
+while they were endeavouring to avoid this turning movement they fell into
+the ambush which Bruno Bauer had laid in their rear: Wrede held up the
+Marcan hypothesis and demanded the pass-word for the theory of the
+Messianic consciousness and claims of Jesus to which it was acting as
+convoy.
+
+The eschatological and the literary school, finding themselves thus
+opposed to a common enemy, naturally formed an alliance. The object of
+their combined attack was not the Marcan outline of the life of Jesus,
+which, in fact, they both accept, but the modern "psychological" method of
+reading between the lines of the Marcan narrative. Under the cross fire of
+these allies that idea of development which had been the strongest
+entrenchment of the liberal critical Lives of Jesus, and which they had
+been desperately endeavouring to strengthen down to the very last, was
+finally blown to atoms.
+
+But the striking thing about these liberal critical Lives of Jesus was
+that they unconsciously prepared the way for a deeper historical view
+which could not have been reached apart from them. A deeper understanding
+of a subject is only brought to pass when a theory is carried to its
+utmost limit and finally proves its own inadequacy.
+
+There is this in common between rationalism and the liberal critical
+method, that each had followed out a theory to its ultimate consequences.
+The liberal critical school had carried to its limit the explanation of
+the connexion of the actions of Jesus, and of the events of His life, by a
+"natural" psychology; and the conclusions to which they had been driven
+had prepared the way for the recognition that the natural psychology is
+not here the historical psychology, but that the latter must be deduced
+from certain historical data. Thus through the meritorious and
+magnificently sincere work of the liberal critical school the a priori
+"natural" psychology gave way to the eschatological. That is the net
+result, from the historical point of view, of the study of the life of
+Jesus in the post-Straussian period.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV. THE ESCHATOLOGICAL QUESTION
+
+
+    _Timothee Colani._ Jesus-Christ et les croyances messianiques de
+    son temps. Strassburg, 1864. 255 pp.
+
+    _Gustav Volkmar._ Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit,
+    mit den beiden ersten Erzaehlern. (Jesus the Nazarene and the
+    Beginnings of Christianity, with the two earliest narrators of His
+    life.) Zurich, 1882. 403 pp.
+
+    _Wilhelm Weiffenbach._ Der Wiederkunftsgedanke Jesu. (Jesus'
+    Conception of His Second Coming.) 1873. 424 pp.
+
+    _W. Baldensperger._ Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der
+    messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit. (The Self-consciousness of
+    Jesus in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His time.)
+    Strassburg, 1888. 2nd ed., 1892, 282 pp.; 3rd ed. pt. i. 240 pp.
+
+    _Johannes Weiss._ Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes. (The
+    Preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God.) 1892.
+    Goettingen. 67 pp. Second revised and enlarged edition, 1900, 210
+    pp.
+
+
+So long as it was merely a question of establishing the distinctive
+character of the thought of Jesus as compared with the ancient prophetic
+and Danielic conceptions, and so long as the only available storehouse of
+Rabbinic and Late-Jewish ideas was Lightfoot's _Horae Hebraicae et
+Talmudicae in quatuor Evangelistas_,(149) it was still possible to cherish
+the belief that the preaching of Jesus could be conceived as something
+which was, in the last analysis, independent of all contemporary ideas.
+But after the studies of Hilgenfeld and Dillmann(150) had made known the
+Jewish apocalyptic in its fundamental characteristics, and the Jewish
+pseudepigrapha were no longer looked on as "forgeries," but as
+representative documents of the last stage of Jewish thought, the
+necessity of taking account of them in interpreting the thought of Jesus
+became more and more emphatic. Almost two decades were to pass, however,
+before the full significance of this material was realised.
+
+It might almost have seemed as if it was to meet this attack by
+anticipation that Colani wrote in 1864 his work, _Jesus-Christ et les
+croyances messianiques de son temps_.
+
+Timothee Colani was born in 1824 at Leme (Aisne), studied in Strassburg
+and became pastor there in 1851. In the year 1864 he was appointed
+Professor of Pastoral Theology in Strassburg in spite of some attempted
+opposition to the appointment on the part of the orthodox party in Paris,
+which was then growing in strength. The events of the year 1870 left him
+without a post. As he had no prospect of being called to a pastorate in
+France, he became a merchant. In consequence of some unfortunate business
+operations he lost all his property. In 1875 he obtained a post as
+librarian at the Sorbonne. He died in 1888.
+
+How far was Jesus a Jew? That was the starting-point of Colani's study.
+According to him there was a complete lack of homogeneity in the Messianic
+hopes cherished by the Jewish people in the time of Jesus, since the
+prophetic conception, according to which the Kingdom of the Messiah
+belonged to the present world-order, and the apocalyptic, which
+transferred it to the future age, had not yet been brought into any kind
+of unity. The general expectation was focused rather upon the Forerunner
+than upon the Messiah. Jesus Himself in the first period of His public
+ministry, up to Mark viii., had never designated Himself as the Messiah,
+for the expression Son of Man carried no Messianic associations for the
+multitude. His fundamental thought was that of perfect communion with God;
+only little by little, as the success of the preaching of the Kingdom more
+and more impressed His mind, did His consciousness take on a Messianic
+colouring. In face of the undisciplined expectations of the people He
+constantly repeats in His parables of the growth of the Kingdom, the word
+"patience." By revealing Himself as the Lord of this spiritual kingdom He
+makes an end of the oscillation between the sensuous and the spiritual in
+the current expectations of the future blessedness. He points to mankind
+as a whole, not merely to the chosen people, as the people of the Kingdom,
+and substitutes for the apocalyptic catastrophe an organic development. By
+His interpretation of Psalm cx., in Mark xii. 35-37, He makes known that
+the Messiah has nothing whatever to do with the Davidic kingship. It was
+only with difficulty that He came to resolve to accept the title of
+Messiah; He knew what a weight of national prejudices and national hopes
+hung upon it.
+
+But He is "Messiah the Son of Man"; He created this expression in order
+thereby to make known His lowliness. In the moment in which He accepted
+the office He registered the resolve to suffer. His purpose is, to be the
+suffering, not the triumphant, Messiah. It is to the influence which His
+Passion exercises upon the souls of men that He looks for the firm
+establishment of His Kingdom.
+
+This spiritual conception of the Kingdom cannot possibly be combined with
+the thought of a glorious Second Coming, for if Jesus had held this latter
+view He must necessarily have thought of the present life as only a kind
+of prologue to that second existence. Neither the Jewish, nor the Jewish-
+Christian eschatology as represented in the eschatological discourses in
+the Gospels, can, therefore, in Colani's opinion, belong to the preaching
+of Jesus. That He should sometimes have made use of the imagery associated
+with the Jewish expectations of the future is, of course, only natural.
+But the eschatology occupies far too important a place in the tradition of
+the preaching of Jesus to be explained as a mere symbolical mode of
+expression. It forms a substantial element of that preaching. A
+spiritualisation of it will not meet the case. Therefore, if the
+conviction has been arrived at on other grounds that Jesus' preaching did
+not follow the lines of Jewish eschatology, there is only one possible way
+of dealing with it, and that is by excising it from the text on critical
+grounds.
+
+The only element in the preaching of Jesus which can, in Colani's opinion,
+be called in any sense "eschatological" was the conviction that there
+would be a wide extension of the Gospel even within the existing
+generation, that Gentiles should be admitted to the Kingdom, and that in
+consequence of the general want of receptivity towards the message of
+salvation, judgment should come upon the nations.
+
+These views of Colani furnish him with a basis upon which to decide on the
+genuineness or otherwise of the eschatological discourses. Among the
+sayings put into the mouth of Jesus which must be rejected as impossible
+are: the promise, in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve, of
+the imminent coming of the Son of Man, Matt. x. 23; the promise to the
+disciples that they should sit upon twelve thrones judging the tribes of
+Israel, Matt. xix. 28; the saying about His return in Matt. xxiii. 39; the
+final eschatological saying at the Last Supper, Matt. xxvi. 29, "the
+Papias-like Chiliasm of which is unworthy of Jesus"; and the prediction of
+His coming on the clouds of heaven with which He closes His Messianic
+confession before the Council. The apocalyptic discourses in Mark xiii.,
+Matt. xxiv., and Luke xxi. are interpolated. A Jewish-Christian apocalypse
+of the first century, probably composed before the destruction of
+Jerusalem, has been interwoven with a short exhortation which Jesus gave
+on the occasion when He predicted the destruction of the temple.
+
+According to Colani, therefore, Jesus did not expect to come again from
+Heaven to complete His work. It was completed by His death, and the
+purpose of the coming of the Spirit was to make manifest its completion.
+Strauss and Renan had entered upon the path of explaining Jesus' preaching
+from the history of the time by the assumption of an intermixture in it of
+Jewish ideas, but it was now recognised "that this path is a cul-de-sac,
+and that criticism must turn round and get out of it as quickly as
+possible."
+
+The new feature of Colani's view was not so much the uncompromising
+rejection of eschatology as the clear recognition that its rejection was
+not a matter to be disposed of in a phrase or two, but necessitated a
+critical analysis of the text.
+
+The systematic investigation of the Synoptic apocalypse was a contribution
+to criticism of the utmost importance.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+In the year 1882 Volkmar took up this attempt afresh, at least in its main
+features.(151) His construction rests upon two main points of support;
+upon his view of the sources and his conception of the eschatology of the
+time of Jesus. In his view the sole source for the Life of Jesus is the
+Gospel of Mark, which was "probably written exactly in the year 73," five
+years after the Johannine apocalypse.
+
+The other two of the first three Gospels belong to the second century, and
+can only be used by way of supplement. Luke dates from the beginning of
+the first decade of the century; while Matthew is regarded by Volkmar, as
+by Wilke, as being a combination of Mark and Luke, and is relegated to the
+end of this first decade. The work is in his opinion a revision of the
+Gospel tradition "in the spirit of that primitive Christianity which,
+while constantly opposing the tendency of the apostle of the Gentiles to
+make light of the Law, was nevertheless so far universalistic that,
+starting from the old legal ground, it made the first steps towards a
+catholic unity." Once Matthew has been set aside in this way, the literary
+elimination of the eschatology follows as a matter of course; the much
+smaller element of discourse in Mark can offer no serious resistance.
+
+As regards the Messianic expectations of the time, they were, in Volkmar's
+opinion, such that Jesus could not possibly have come forward with
+Messianic claims. The Messianic Son of Man, whose aim was to found a
+super-earthly Kingdom, only arose in Judaism under the influence of
+Christian dogma. The contemporaries of Jesus knew only the political ideal
+of the Messianic King. And woe to any one who conjured up these hopes! The
+Baptist had done so by his too fervent preaching about repentance and the
+Kingdom, and had been promptly put out of the way by the Tetrarch. The
+version found even in Mark, which represents that it was on Herodias'
+account, and at her daughter's petition, that John was beheaded, is a
+later interpretation which, according to Volkmar, is evidently false on
+chronological grounds, since the Baptist was dead before Herod took
+Herodias as his wife. Had Jesus desired the Messiahship, He could only
+have claimed it in this political sense. The alternative is to suppose
+that He did not desire it.
+
+Volkmar's contribution to the subject consists in the formulating of this
+clean-cut alternative. Colani had indeed recognised the alternative, but
+had not taken up a consistent attitude in regard to it. Here, that way of
+escape from the difficulty is barred, which suggests that Jesus set
+Himself up as Messiah, but in another than the popular sense. What may be
+called Jesus' Messianic consciousness consisted solely "in knowing Himself
+to be first-born among many brethren, the Son of God after the Spirit, and
+consequently feeling Himself enabled and impelled to bring about that
+regeneration of His people which alone could make it worthy of
+deliverance." It is in any case clearly evident from Paul, from the
+Apocalypse, and from Mark, "the three documentary witnesses emanating from
+the circle of the followers of Jesus during the first century, that it was
+only after His crucifixion that Jesus was hailed as the Christ; never
+during His earthly life." The elimination of the eschatology thus leads
+also to the elimination of the Messiahship of Jesus.
+
+If we are told in Mark viii. 29 that Simon Peter was the first among men
+to hail Jesus as the Messiah, it is to be noticed, Volkmar points out,
+that the Evangelist places this confession at a time when Jesus' work was
+over and the thought of His Passion first appears; and if we desire fully
+to understand the author's purpose we must fix our attention on the Lord's
+command not to make known His Messiahship until after His resurrection
+(Mark viii. 30, ix. 9 and 10), which is a hint that we are to date Jesus'
+Messiahship from His death. For Mark is no mere naive chronicler, but a
+conscious artist interpreting the history; sometimes, indeed, a powerful
+epic writer in whose work the historical and the poetic are intermingled.
+
+Thus the conclusion is that Mark, in agreement with Paul, represents Jesus
+as becoming the Messiah only as a consequence of His resurrection. He
+really appeared, and His first appearance was to Peter. When Peter on that
+night of terror fled from Jerusalem to take refuge in Galilee, Jesus,
+according to the mystic prediction of Mark xiv. 28 and xvi. 7, went before
+him. "He was constantly present to his spirit, until on the third day He
+manifested Himself before his eyes, in the heavenly appearance which was
+also vouchsafed to the last of the apostles 'as he was in the way'--and
+Peter, enraptured, gave expression to the clear conviction with which the
+whole life of Jesus had inspired him in the cry 'Thou art the Christ.'"
+
+The historical Jesus therefore founded a community of followers without
+advancing any claims to the Messiahship. He desired only to be a reformer,
+the spiritual deliverer of the people of God, to realise upon earth the
+Kingdom of God which they were all seeking in the beyond, and to extend
+the reign of God over all nations. "The Kingdom of God is doubtless to win
+its final and decisive victory by the almighty aid of God; our duty is to
+see to its beginnings"--that is, according to Volkmar, the lesson which
+Jesus teaches us in the parable of the Sower. The ethic of this Kingdom
+was not yet confused by any eschatological ideas. It was only when, as the
+years went on, the expectation of the Parousia rose to a high pitch of
+intensity that "marriage and the bringing up of children came to be
+regarded as superfluous, and were consequently thought of as signs of an
+absorption in earthly interests which was out of harmony with the near
+approach to the goal of these hopes." Jesus had renewed the foundations on
+which "the family" was based and had made it, in turn, a corner stone of
+the Kingdom of God, even as He had consecrated the common meal by making
+it a love feast.
+
+In most things Jesus was conservative. The ritual worship of the God of
+Israel remained for Him always a sacred thing. But in spite of that He
+withdrew more and more from the synagogue, the scene of His earliest
+preaching, and taught in the houses of His disciples. "He had learned to
+fulfil the law as implicit in one highest commandment and supreme
+principle, therefore 'in spirit and in truth'; but He never, as appears
+from all the evidence, declared it to be abolished." "We may be equally
+certain, however, that Jesus, while He asserted the abiding validity of
+the Ten Commandments, never explicitly declared that of the Mosaic Law as
+a whole. The absence of any such saying from the tradition regarding Jesus
+made it possible for Paul to take his decisive step forward."
+
+As regards the Gospel discourses about the Parousia, it is easy to
+recognise that, even in Mark, these "are one and all the work of the
+narrator, whose purpose is edification. He connects his work as closely as
+possible with the Apocalypse, which had appeared some five years earlier,
+in order to emphasise, in contrast to it, the higher truth." Jesus' own
+hope, in all its clearness and complete originality, is recorded in the
+parables of the seed growing secretly and the grain of mustard seed, and
+in the saying about the immortality of His words. Nothing beyond this is
+in any way certain, however remarkable the saying in Mark ix. 1 may be,
+that the looked-for consummation is to take place during the lifetime of
+the existing generation.
+
+"It is only the fact that Mark is preceded by 'the book of the Birth (and
+History) of Christ according to Matthew'--not only in the Scriptures, but
+also in men's minds, which were dominated by it as the 'first
+Gospel'--which has caused it to be taken as self-evident that Jesus,
+knowing Himself from the first to be the Messiah, expected His Parousia
+solely from heaven, and therefore with, or in, the clouds of heaven....
+But since He who was thought of as by birth the Son of God, is now thought
+of as the Son of Man, born an Israelite, and becoming the Son of God after
+the spirit only at His baptism, the hope that looks to the clouds of
+heaven cannot be, or at least ought not to be, any longer explained
+otherwise than as an enthusiastic dream."
+
+If, even at the beginning of the 'eighties, a so extreme theory on the
+other side could, without opposition, occupy all the points of vantage, it
+is evident that the theory which gave eschatology its due place was making
+but slow progress. It was not that any one had been disputing the ground
+with it, but that all its operations were characterised by a nervous
+timidity. And these hesitations are not to be laid to the account of those
+who did not perceive the approach of the decisive conflict, or refused to
+accept battle, like the followers of Reuss, for instance, who were
+satisfied with the hypothesis that thoughts about the Last Judgment had
+forced their way into the authentic discourses of Jesus about the
+destruction of the city;(152) even those who like Weiffenbach are fully
+convinced that "the eschatological question, and in particular the
+question of the Second Coming, which in many quarters has up to the
+present been treated as a _noli me tangere_, must sooner or later become
+the battle-ground of the greatest and most decisive of theological
+controversies"--even those who shared this conviction stopped half-way on
+the road on which they had entered.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Weiffenbach's(153) work, "Jesus' Conception of His Second Coming,"
+published in 1873, sums up the results of the previous discussions of the
+subject. He names as among those who ascribe the expectation of the
+Parousia, in the sensuous form in which it meets us in the documents, to a
+misunderstanding of the teaching of Jesus on the part of the disciples and
+the writers who were dependent upon them--Schleiermacher, Bleek, Holtzmann,
+Schenkel, Colani, Baur, Hase, and Meyer. Among those who maintained that
+the Parousia formed an integral part of Jesus' teaching, he cites Keim,
+Weizsaecker, Strauss, and Renan. He considers that the readiest way to
+advance the discussion will be by undertaking a critical review of the
+attempt to analyse the great Synoptic discourse about the future in which
+Colani had led the way.
+
+The question of the Parousia is like, Weiffenbach suggests, a vessel which
+has become firmly wedged between rocks. Any attempt to get it afloat again
+will be useless until a new channel is found for it. His detailed
+discussions are devoted to endeavouring to discover the relation between
+the declarations regarding the Second Coming and the predictions of the
+Passion. In the course of his analysis of the great prophetic discourse he
+rejects the suggestion made by Weisse in his _Evangelienfrage_ of 1856,
+that the eschatological character of the discourse results from the way in
+which it is put together; that while the sayings in their present mosaic-
+like combination certainly have a reference to the last things, each of
+them individually in its original context might well bear a natural sense.
+In Colani's hypothesis of conflation the suggestion was to be rejected
+that it was not "Ur-Markus," but the author of the Synoptic apocalypse who
+was responsible for the working in of the "Little Apocalypse."(154) It was
+an unsatisfactory feature of Weizsaecker's position(155) that he insisted
+on regarding the "Little Apocalypse" as Jewish, not Jewish-Christian;
+Pfleiderer had distinguished sharply what belongs to the Evangelist from
+the "Little Apocalypse," and had sought to prove that the purpose of the
+Evangelist in thus breaking up the latter and working it into a discourse
+of Jesus was to tone down the eschatological hopes expressed in the
+discourse, because they had remained unfulfilled even at the fall of
+Jerusalem, and to retard the rapid development of the apocalyptic process
+by inserting between its successive phases passages from a different
+discourse.(156) Weiffenbach carries this series of tentative suggestions
+to its logical conclusion, advancing the view that the link of connexion
+between the Jewish-Christian Apocalypse and the Gospel material in which
+it is embedded is the thought of the Second Coming. This was the thought
+which gave the impulse from without towards the transmutation of Jewish
+into Jewish-Christian eschatology. Jesus must have given expression to the
+thought of His near return; and Jewish-Christianity subsequently painted
+it over with the colours of Jewish eschatology.
+
+In developing this theory, Weiffenbach thought that he had succeeded in
+solving the problem which had been first critically formulated by Keim,
+who is constantly emphasising the idea that the eschatological hopes of
+the disciples could not be explained merely from their Judaic pre-
+suppositions, but that some incentive to the formation of these hopes must
+be sought in the preaching of Jesus; otherwise primitive Christianity and
+the life of Jesus would stand side by side unconnected and unexplained,
+and in that case we must give up all hope "of distinguishing the sure word
+of the Lord from Israel's restless speculations about the future."
+
+When the Jewish-Christian Apocalypse has been eliminated, we arrive at a
+discourse, spoken on the Mount of Olives, in which Jesus exhorted His
+disciples to watchfulness, in view of the near, but nevertheless
+undefined, hour of the return of "the Master of the House."
+
+In this discourse, therefore, we have a standard by which criticism may
+test all the eschatological sayings and discourses. Weiffenbach has the
+merit of having gathered together all the eschatological material of the
+Synoptics and examined it in the light of a definite principle. In Colani
+the material was incomplete, and instead of a critical principle he
+offered only an arbitrary exegesis which permitted him, for example, to
+conceive the watchfulness on which the eschatological parables constantly
+insist as only a vivid expression for the sense of responsibility "which
+weighs upon the life of man."
+
+And yet the outcome of this attempt of Weiffenbach's, which begins with so
+much real promise, is in the end wholly unsatisfactory. The "authentic
+thought of the return" which he takes as his standard has for its sole
+content the expectation of a visible personal return in the near future
+"free from all more or less fantastic apocalyptic and Jewish-Christian
+speculations about the future." That is to say, the whole of the
+eschatological discourses of Jesus are to be judged by the standard of a
+colourless, unreal figment of theology. Whatever cannot be squared with
+that is to be declared spurious and cut away! Accordingly the
+eschatological closing saying at the Last Supper is stigmatised as a
+"Chiliastic-Capernaitic"(157) distortion of a "normal" promise of the
+Second Coming; the idea of the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}, Matt. xix. 28, is said to be
+wholly foreign to Jesus' world of thought; it is impossible, too, that
+Jesus can have thought of Himself as the Judge of the world, for the
+Jewish and Jewish-Christian eschatology does not ascribe the conduct of
+the Last Judgment to the Messiah; that is first done by Gentile
+Christians, and especially by Paul. It was, therefore, the later
+eschatology which set the Son of Man on the throne of His glory and
+prepared "the twelve thrones of judgment for the disciples." The historian
+ought only to admit such of the sayings about bearing rule in the
+Messianic Kingdom as can be interpreted in a spiritual, non-sensuous
+fashion.
+
+In the end Weiffenbach's critical principle proves to be merely a bludgeon
+with which he goes seal-hunting and clubs the defenceless Synoptic sayings
+right and left. When his work is done you see before you a desert island
+strewn with quivering corpses. Nevertheless the slaughter was not aimless,
+or at least it was not without result.
+
+In the first place, it did really appear, as a by-product of the critical
+processes, that Jesus' discourses about the future had nothing to do with
+an historical prevision of the destruction of Jerusalem, whereas the
+supposition that they had, had hitherto been taken as self-evident, the
+prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem being regarded as the historic
+nucleus of Jesus' discourses regarding the future, to which the idea of
+the Last Judgment had subsequently attached itself.
+
+Here, then, we have the introduction of the converse opinion, which was
+subsequently established as correct; namely, that Jesus foresaw, indeed,
+the Last Judgment, but not the historical destruction of Jerusalem.
+
+In the next place, in the course of his critical examination of the
+eschatological material, Weiffenbach stumbles upon the discourse at the
+sending forth of the Twelve in Matt. x., and finds himself face to face
+with the fact that the discourse which he was expected to regard as a
+discourse of instruction was really nothing of the kind, but a collection
+of eschatological sayings. As he had taken over along with the Marcan
+hypothesis the closely connected view of the composite character of the
+Synoptic discourses, he does not allow himself to be misled, but regards
+this inappropriate charge to the Twelve as nothing else than an impossible
+anticipation and a bold anachronism. He knows that he is at one in this
+with Holtzmann, Colani, Bleek, Scholten, Meyer, and Keim, who also made
+the discourse of instruction end at the point beyond which they find it
+impossible to explain it, and regard the predictions of persecution as
+only possible in the later period of the life of Jesus. "For these
+predictions," to express Weiffenbach's view in the words of Keim, "are too
+much at variance with the essentially gracious and happy mood which
+suggested the sending forth of the disciples, and reflect instead the
+lurid gloom of the fierce conflicts of the later period and the sadness of
+the farewell discourses."
+
+It was a good thing that Bruno Bauer did not hear this chorus. If he had,
+he would have asked Weiffenbach and his allies whether the poor fragment
+that remained after the critical dissection of the "charge to the Twelve"
+was "a discourse of instruction," and if in view of these difficulties
+they could not realise why he had refused, thirty years before, to believe
+in the "discourse of instruction." But Bruno Bauer heard nothing: and so
+their blissful unconsciousness lasted for nearly a generation longer.
+
+The expectation of His Second Coming, repeatedly expressed by Jesus
+towards the close of His life, is on this hypothesis authentic; it was
+painted over by the primitive Christian community with the colours of its
+own eschatology, in consequence of the delay of the Parousia; and in view
+of the mission to the Gentiles a more cautious conception of the nearness
+of the time commended itself; nay, when Jerusalem had fallen and the
+"signs of the end" which had been supposed to be discovered in the horrors
+of the years 68 and 69 had passed without result, the return of Jesus was
+relegated to a distant future by the aid of the doctrine that the Gospel
+must first be preached to all the heathen. Thus the Parousia, which
+according to the Jewish-Christian eschatology belonged to the present age,
+was transferred to the future. "With this combination and making
+coincident--they were not so at the first--of the Second Coming, the end of
+the world, and the final Judgment, the idea of the Second Coming reached
+the last and highest stage of its development."
+
+Weiffenbach's view, as we have seen, empties Jesus' expectation of His
+return of almost all its content, and to that is due the fact that his
+investigation did not prove so useful as it might have done. His purpose
+is, following suggestions thrown out by Schleiermacher and Weisse, to
+prove the identity of the predictions of the Second Coming and of the
+Resurrection, and he takes as his starting-point the observation that the
+conduct of the disciples after the death of Jesus forbids us to suppose
+that the Resurrection had been predicted in clear and unambiguous sayings,
+and that, on the other hand, the announcement of the Second Coming
+coincides in point of time with the predictions of the Resurrection, and
+the predictions both of the Second Coming and of the Resurrection stand in
+organic connexion with the announcement of His approaching death. The two
+are therefore identical.
+
+It was only after the death of their Master that the disciples
+differentiated the thought of the Resurrection from that of the Second
+Coming. The Resurrection did not bring them that which the Second Coming
+had promised; but it produced the result that the eschatological hopes,
+which Jesus had with difficulty succeeded in damping, flamed up again in
+the hearts of His disciples. The spiritual presence of the Deliverer who
+had manifested Himself to them did not seem to them to be the fulfilment
+of the promise of the Second Coming; but the expectation of the latter,
+being brought into contact with the flame of eschatological hope with
+which their hearts were a-fire, was fused, and cast into a form quite
+different from that in which it had been derived from the words of Jesus.
+
+That is all finely observed. For the first time it had dawned upon
+historical criticism that the great question is that concerning the
+identity or difference of the Parousia and the Resurrection. But the man
+who had been the first to grasp that thought, and who had undertaken his
+whole study with the special purpose of working it out, was too much under
+the influence of the spiritualised eschatology of Schleiermacher and
+Weisse to be able to assign the right values in the solution of his
+equation. And, withal, he is too much inclined to play the apologist as a
+subsidiary role. He is not content merely to render the history
+intelligible; he is, by his own confession, urged on by the hope that
+perhaps a way may be found of causing that "error" of Jesus to disappear
+and proving it to be an illusion due to the want of a sufficiently close
+study of His discourses. But the historian simply must not be an
+apologist; he must leave that to those who come after him and he may do so
+with a quiet mind, for the apologists, as we learn from the history of the
+Lives of Jesus, can get the better of any historical result whatever. It
+is, therefore, quite unnecessary that the historian should allow himself
+to be led astray by following an apologetic will-o'-the-wisp.
+
+Technically regarded, the mistake on which Weiffenbach's investigation
+made shipwreck was the failure to bring the Jewish apocalyptic material
+into relation with the Synoptic data. If he had done this, it would have
+been impossible for him to extract an absolutely unreal and unhistorical
+conception of the Second Coming out of the discourses of Jesus.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+The task which Weiffenbach had neglected remained undone--to the detriment
+of theology--until Baldensperger(158) repaired the omission. His book, "The
+Self-consciousness of Jesus in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His
+Time,"(159) published in 1888, made its impression by reason of the
+fullness of its material. Whereas Colani and Volkmar had still been able
+to deny the existence of a fully formed Messianic expectation in the time
+of Jesus, the genesis of the expectation was now fully traced out, and it
+was shown that the world of thought which meets us in Daniel had won the
+victory, that the "Son of Man" Messiah of the Similitudes of Enoch was the
+last product of the Messianic hope prior to the time of Jesus; and that
+therefore the fully developed Danielic scheme with its unbridgeable chasm
+between the present and the future world furnished the outline within
+which all further and more detailed traits were inserted. The honour of
+having effectively pioneered the way for this discovery belongs to
+Schuerer.(160) Baldensperger adopts his ideas, but sets them forth in a
+much more direct way, because he, in contrast with Schuerer, gives no
+_system_ of Messianic expectation--and there never in reality was a
+system--but is content to picture its many-sided growth.
+
+He does not, it is true, escape some minor inconsistencies. For example,
+the idea of a "political Messiahship," which is really set aside by his
+historical treatment, crops up here and there, as though the author had
+not entirely got rid of it himself. But the impression made by the book as
+a whole was overpowering.
+
+Nevertheless this book does not exactly fulfil the promise of its title,
+any more than Weiffenbach's. The reader expects that now at last Jesus'
+sayings about Himself will be consistently explained in the light of the
+Jewish Messianic ideas, but that is not done. For Baldensperger, instead
+of tracing down and working out the conception of the Kingdom of God held
+by Jesus as a product of the Jewish eschatology, at least by way of trying
+whether that method would suffice, takes it over direct from modern
+historical theology. He assumes as self-evident that Jesus' conception of
+the Kingdom of God had a double character, that the eschatological and
+spiritual elements were equally represented in it and mutually conditioned
+one another, and that Jesus therefore began, in pursuance of this
+conception, to found a spiritual invisible Kingdom, although He expected
+its fulfilment to be effected by supernatural means. Consequently there
+must also have been a duality in His religious consciousness, in which
+these two conceptions had to be combined. Jesus' Messianic consciousness
+sprang, according to Baldensperger, "from a religious root"; that is to
+say, the Messianic consciousness was a special modification of a self-
+consciousness in which a pure, spiritual, unique relation to God was the
+fundamental element; and from this arises the possibility of a spiritual
+transformation of the Jewish-Messianic self-consciousness. In making these
+assumptions, Baldensperger does not ask himself whether it is not possible
+that for Jesus the purely Jewish consciousness of a transcendental
+Messiahship may itself have been religious, nay even spiritual, just as
+well as the Messiahship resting on a vague, indefinite, colourless sense
+of union with God which modern theologians arbitrarily attribute to Him.
+
+Again, instead of arriving at the two conceptions, Kingdom of God and
+Messianic consciousness, purely empirically, by an unbiased comparison of
+the Synoptic passages with the Late-Jewish conceptions, Baldensperger, in
+this following Holtzmann, brings them into his theory in the dual form in
+which contemporary theology, now becoming faintly tinged with eschatology,
+offered them to him. Consequently, everything has to be adapted to this
+duality. Jesus, for example, in applying to Himself the title Son of Man,
+thinks not only of the transcendental significance which it has in the
+Jewish apocalyptic, but gives it at the same time an ethico-religious
+colouring.
+
+Finally, the duality is explained by an application of the genetic method,
+in which the "course of the development of the self-consciousness of
+Jesus" is traced out. The historical psychology of the Marcan hypothesis
+here shows its power of adapting itself to eschatology. From the first, to
+follow the course of Baldensperger's exposition, the eschatological view
+influenced Jesus' expectation of the Kingdom and His Messianic
+consciousness. In the wilderness, after the dawn of His Messianic
+consciousness at His baptism, He had rejected the ideal of the Messianic
+king of David's line and put away all warlike thoughts. Then He began to
+found the Kingdom of God by preaching. For a time the spiritualised idea
+of the Kingdom was dominant in His mind, the Messianic eschatological idea
+falling rather into the background.
+
+But His silence regarding His Messianic office was partly due to
+paedagogic reasons, "since He desired to lead His hearers to a more
+spiritual conception of the Kingdom and so to obviate a possible political
+movement on their part and the consequent intervention of the Roman
+government." In addition to this He had also personal reasons for not
+revealing Himself which only disappeared in the moment when His death and
+Second Coming became part of His plan; previous to that He did not know
+how and when the Kingdom was to come. Prior to the confession at Caesarea
+Philippi, the disciples "had only a faint and vague suspicion of the
+Messianic dignity of their Master."
+
+This was "rather the preparatory stage of His Messianic work."
+Objectively, it may be described "as the period of growing emphasis upon
+the spiritual characteristics of the Kingdom, and of resigned waiting and
+watching for its outward manifestation in glory; subjectively, from the
+point of view of the self-consciousness of Jesus, it may be characterised
+as the period of the struggle between His religious conviction of His
+Messiahship and the traditional rationalistic Messianic belief."
+
+This first period opens out into a second in which He had attained to
+perfect clearness of vision and complete inner harmony. By the acceptance
+of the idea of suffering, Jesus' inner peace is enhanced to the highest
+degree conceivable. "By throwing Himself upon the thought of death He
+escaped the lingering uncertainty as to when and how God would fulfil His
+promise...." "The coming of the Kingdom was fixed down to the Second
+Coming of the Messiah. Now He ventured to regard Himself as the Son of Man
+who was to be the future Judge of the world, for the suffering and dying
+Son of Man was closely associated with the Son of Man surrounded by the
+host of heaven. Would the people accept Him as Messiah? He now, in
+Jerusalem, put the question to them in all its sharpness and burning
+actuality; and the people were moved to enthusiasm. But so soon as they
+saw that He whom they had hailed with such acclamation was neither able
+nor willing to fulfil their ambitious dreams, a reaction set in."
+
+Thus, according to Baldensperger, there was an interaction between the
+historical and the psychological events. And that is right!--if only the
+machinery were not so complicated, and a "development" had not to be
+ground out of it at whatever cost. But this, and the whole manner of
+treatment in the second part, encumbered as it is with parenthetic
+qualifications, was rendered inevitable by the adoption of the two
+aforesaid not purely historical conceptions. Sometimes, too, one gets the
+impression that the author felt that he owed it to the school to which he
+belonged to advance no assertion without adding the limitations which
+scientifically secure it against attack. Thus on every page he digs
+himself into an entrenched position, with palisades of footnotes--in fact
+the book actually ends with a footnote. But the conception which underlay
+the whole was so full of vigour that in spite of the thoughts not being
+always completely worked out, it produced a powerful impression.
+Baldensperger had persuaded theology at least to admit the
+hypothesis--whether it took up a positive or negative position in regard to
+it--that Jesus possessed a fully-developed eschatology. He thus provided a
+new basis for discussion and gave an impulse to the study of the subject
+such as it had not received since the 'sixties, at least not in the same
+degree of energy. Perhaps the very limitations of the work, due as they
+were to its introduction of modern ideas, rendered it better adapted to
+the spirit of the age, and consequently more influential, than if it had
+been characterised by that rigorous maintenance of a single point of view
+which was abstractly requisite for the proper treatment of the subject. It
+was precisely the rejection of this rigorous consistency which enabled it
+to gain ground for the cause of eschatology.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+But the consistent treatment from a single point of view was bound to
+come; and it came four years later. In passing from Weiffenbach and
+Baldensperger to Johannes Weiss(161) the reader feels like an explorer who
+after weary wanderings through billowy seas of reed-grass at length
+reaches a wooded tract, and instead of swamp feels firm ground beneath his
+feet, instead of yielding rushes sees around him the steadfast trees. At
+last there is an end of "qualifying clause" theology, of the "and yet,"
+the "on the other hand," the "notwithstanding"! The reader had to follow
+the others step by step, making his way over every footbridge and gang-
+plank which they laid down, following all the meanderings in which they
+indulged, and must never let go their hands if he wished to come safely
+through the labyrinth of spiritual and eschatological ideas which they
+supposed to be found in the thought of Jesus.
+
+In Weiss there are none of these devious paths: "behold the land lies
+before thee."
+
+His "Preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God,"(162) published in
+1892, has, on its own lines, an importance equal to that of Strauss's
+first Life of Jesus. He lays down the third great alternative which the
+study of the life of Jesus had to meet. The first was laid down by
+Strauss: _either_ purely historical _or_ purely supernatural. The second
+had been worked out by the Tuebingen school and Holtzmann: _either_
+Synoptic _or_ Johannine. Now came the third: _either_ eschatological _or_
+non-eschatological!
+
+Progress always consists in taking one or other of two alternatives, in
+abandoning the attempt to combine them. The pioneers of progress have
+therefore always to reckon with the law of mental inertia which manifests
+itself in the majority--who always go on believing that it is possible to
+combine that which can no longer be combined, and in fact claim it as a
+special merit that they, in contrast with the "one-sided" writers, can do
+justice to the other side of the question. One must just let them be, till
+their time is over, and resign oneself not to see the end of it, since it
+is found by experience that the complete victory of one of two historical
+alternatives is a matter of two full theological generations.
+
+This remark is made in order to explain why the work of Johannes Weiss did
+not immediately make an end of the mediating views. Another reason perhaps
+was that, according to the usual canons of theological authorship, the
+book was much too short--only sixty-seven pages--and too simple to allow its
+full significance to be realised. And yet it is precisely this simplicity
+which makes it one of the most important works in historical theology. It
+seems to break a spell. It closes one epoch and begins another.
+
+Weiffenbach had failed to solve the problem of the Second Coming,
+Baldensperger that of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, because both
+of them allowed a false conception of the Kingdom of God to keep its place
+among the data. The general conception of the Kingdom was first rightly
+grasped by Johannes Weiss. All modern ideas, he insists, even in their
+subtlest forms, must be eliminated from it; when this is done, we arrive
+at a Kingdom of God which is wholly future; as is indeed implied by the
+petition in the Lord's prayer, "Thy Kingdom come." Being still to come, it
+is at present purely supra-mundane. It is present only as a cloud may be
+said to be present which throws its shadow upon the earth; its nearness,
+that is to say, is recognised by the paralysis of the Kingdom of Satan. In
+the fact that Jesus casts out the demons, the Pharisees are bidden to
+recognise, according to Matt. xii. 25-28, that the Kingdom of God is
+already come upon them.
+
+This is the only sense in which Jesus thinks of the Kingdom as present. He
+does not "establish it," He only proclaims its coming. He exercises no
+"Messianic functions," but waits, like others, for God to bring about the
+coming of the Kingdom by supernatural means. He does not even know the day
+and hour when this shall come to pass. The missionary journey of the
+disciples was not designed for the extension of the Kingdom of God, but
+only as a means of rapidly and widely making known its nearness. But it
+was not so near as Jesus thought. The impenitence and hardness of heart of
+a great part of the people, and the implacable enmity of His opponents, at
+length convinced Him that the establishment of the Kingdom of God could
+not yet take place, that such penitence as had been shown hitherto was not
+sufficient, and that a mighty obstacle, the guilt of the people, must
+first be put away. It becomes clear to Him that His own death must be the
+ransom-price. He dies, not for the community of His followers only, but
+for the nation; that is why He always speaks of His atoning death as "for
+many," not "for you." After His death He would come again in all the
+splendour and glory with which, since the days of Daniel, men's
+imaginations had surrounded the Messiah, and He was to come, moreover,
+within the lifetime of the generation to which He had proclaimed the
+nearness of the Kingdom of God.
+
+The setting up of the Kingdom was to be preceded by the Day of Judgment.
+In describing the Messianic glory Jesus makes use of the traditional
+picture, but He does so with modesty, restraint, and sobriety. Therein
+consists His greatness.
+
+With political expectations this Kingdom has nothing whatever to do. "To
+hope for the Kingdom of God in the transcendental sense which Jesus
+attaches to it, and to raise a revolution, are two things as different as
+fire and water." The transcendental character of the expectation consists
+precisely in this, that the State and all earthly institutions,
+conditions, and benefits, as belonging to the present age, shall either
+not exist at all in the coming Kingdom, or shall exist only in a
+sublimated form. Hence Jesus cannot preach to men a special ethic of the
+Kingdom of God, but only an ethic which in this world makes men free from
+the world and prepared to enter unimpeded into the Kingdom. That is why
+His ethic is of so completely negative a character; it is, in fact, not so
+much an ethic as a penitential discipline.
+
+The ministry of Jesus is therefore not in principle different from that of
+John the Baptist: there can be no question of a founding and development
+of the Kingdom within the hearts of men. What distinguishes the work of
+Jesus from that of the Baptist is only His consciousness of being the
+Messiah. He awoke to this consciousness at His baptism. But the
+Messiahship which He claims is not a present office; its exercise belongs
+to the future. On earth He is only a man, a prophet, as in the view
+implied in the speeches in the Acts of the Apostles. "Son of Man" is
+therefore, in the passages where it is authentic, a purely eschatological
+designation of the Messiah, though we cannot tell whether His hearers
+understood Him as speaking of Himself in His future rank and dignity, or
+whether they thought of the Son of Man as a being quite distinct from
+Himself, whose coming He was only proclaiming in advance.
+
+"The sole object of this argument is to prove that the Messianic self-
+consciousness of Jesus, as expressed in the title 'Son of Man,' shares in
+the transcendental apocalyptic character of Jesus' idea of the Kingdom of
+God, and cannot be separated from that idea." The only partially correct
+evaluation of the factors in the problem of the Life of Jesus which
+Baldensperger had taken over from contemporary theology, and which had
+hitherto prevented historical science from obtaining a solution of that
+problem, had now been corrected from the history itself, and it was now
+only necessary to insert the corrected data into the calculation.
+
+Here is the point at which it is fitting to recall Reimarus. He was the
+first, and indeed, before Johannes Weiss, the only writer who recognised
+and pointed out that the preaching of Jesus was purely eschatological. It
+is true that his conception of the eschatology was primitive, and that he
+applied it not as a constructive, but as a destructive principle of
+criticism. But read his statement of the problem "with the signs changed,"
+and with the necessary deduction for the primitive character of the
+eschatology, and you have the view of Weiss.
+
+Ghillany, too, has a claim to be remembered. When Weiss asserts that the
+part played by Jesus was not the active role of establishing the Kingdom,
+but the passive role of waiting for the coming of the Kingdom; and that it
+was, in a sense, only by the acceptance of His sufferings that He emerged
+from that passivity; he is only asserting what Ghillany had maintained
+thirty years before with the same arguments and with the same
+decisiveness. But Weiss places the assertion on a scientifically
+unassailable basis.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ESCHATOLOGY
+
+
+    _Wilhelm Bousset._ Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum.
+    Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich. (The Antithesis between
+    Jesus' Preaching and Judaism. A Religious-Historical Comparison.)
+    Goettingen, 1892. 130 pp.
+
+    _Erich Haupt._ Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den
+    synoptischen Evangelien. (The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in
+    the Synoptic Gospels.) 1895. 167 pp.
+
+    _Paul Wernle._ Die Anfaenge unserer Religion. Tuebingen-Leipzig,
+    1901; 2nd ed., 1904, 410 pp.
+
+    _Emil Schuerer._ Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu-Christi.
+    1903. Akademische Festrede. (The Messianic Self-consciousness of
+    Jesus Christ.) 24 pp.
+
+    _Wilhelm Brandt._ Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des
+    Christentums auf Grund einer Kritik der Berichte ueber das Leiden
+    und die Auferstehung Jesu. (The Gospel History and the Origin of
+    Christianity. Based upon a Critical Study of the Narratives of the
+    Sufferings and Resurrection of Jesus.) Leipzig, 1893. 591 pp.
+
+    _Adolf Juelicher._ Die Gleichnisreden Jesu. (The Parables of
+    Jesus.) Vol. i., 1888, 291 pp.; vol. ii., 1899, 643 pp.
+
+
+In this period the important books are short. The sixty-seven pages of
+Johannes Weiss are answered by Bousset(163) in a bare hundred and thirty.
+People began to see that the elaborate Lives of Jesus which had hitherto
+held the field, and enjoyed an immortality of revised editions, only
+masked the fact that the study of the subject was at a standstill; and
+that the tedious re-handling of problems which had been solved so far as
+they were capable of solution only served as an excuse for not grappling
+with those which still remained unsolved.
+
+This conviction is expressed by Bousset at the beginning of his work. The
+criticism of the sources, he says, is finished, and its results may be
+regarded, so far as the Life of Jesus is concerned, as provisionally
+complete. The separation between John and the Synoptists has been secured.
+For the Synoptists, the two-document hypothesis has been established,
+according to which the sources are a primitive form of Mark, and a
+collection of "logia." A certain interest might still attach to the
+attempt to arrive at the primitive kernel of Mark; but the attempt has a
+priori so little prospect of success that it was almost a waste of time to
+continue to work at it. It would be a much more important thing to get rid
+of the feeling of uncertainty and artificiality in the Lives of Jesus.
+What is now chiefly wanted, Bousset thinks, is "a firmly-drawn and life-
+like portrait which, with a few bold strokes, should bring out clearly the
+originality, the force, the personality of Jesus."
+
+It is evident that the centre of the problem has now been reached. That is
+why the writing becomes so terse. The masses of thought can only be
+manoeuvred here in a close formation such as Weiss gives them. The loose
+order of discursive exegetical discussions of separate passages is now no
+longer in place. The first step towards further progress was the simple
+one of marshalling the passages in such a way as to gain a single
+consistent impression from them.
+
+In the first instance Bousset is as ready as Johannes Weiss to admit the
+importance for the mind of Jesus of the eschatological "then" and "now."
+The realistic school, he thinks, are perfectly right in endeavouring to
+relate Jesus, without apologetic or theological inconsistencies, to the
+background of contemporary ideas. Later, in 1901, he was to make it a
+reproach against Harnack's "What is Christianity?" (_Das Wesen des
+Christentums_) that it did not give sufficient importance to the
+background of contemporary thought in its account of the preaching of
+Jesus.(164)
+
+He goes on to ask, however, whether the first enthusiasm over the
+discovery of this genuinely historical way of looking at things should not
+be followed by some "second thoughts" of a deeper character. Accepting the
+position laid down by Johannes Weiss, we must ask, he thinks, whether this
+purely historical criticism, by the exclusive emphasis which it has laid
+upon eschatology, has not allowed the "essential originality and power of
+the personality of Jesus to slip through its fingers," and closed its
+grasp instead upon contemporary conceptions and imaginations which are
+often of a quite special character.
+
+The Late-Jewish eschatology was, according to Bousset, by no means a
+homogeneous system of thought. Realistic and transcendental elements stand
+side by side in it, unreconciled. The genuine popular belief of Late
+Judaism still clung quite naively to the earthly realistic hopes of former
+times, and had never been able to rise to the purely transcendental
+regions which are the characteristic habitat of apocalyptic. The rejection
+of the world is never carried out consistently; something of the Jewish
+national ideal always remains. And for this reason Late Judaism made no
+progress towards the overcoming of particularism.
+
+Probably, Bousset holds, this Apocalyptic thought is not even genuinely
+Jewish; as he ably argued in another work, there was a considerable strain
+of Persian influence in it.(165) The dualism, the transference to the
+transcendental region of the future hope, the conception of the world
+which appears in Jewish apocalyptic, are of Iranian rather than Jewish
+origin.
+
+Two thoughts are especially characteristic of Bousset's position; first,
+that this transcendentalising of the future implied a spiritualisation of
+it; secondly, that in post-exilic Judaism there was always an undercurrent
+of a purer and more spontaneous piety, the presence of which is especially
+to be traced in the Psalms.
+
+Into a dead world, where a kind of incubus seems to stifle all naturalness
+and spontaneity, there comes a living Man. According to the formulae of
+His preaching and the designations which He applies to Himself, He seems
+at first sight to identify Himself with this world rather than to oppose
+it. But these conceptions and titles, especially the Kingdom of God and
+the Son of Man, must be provisionally left in the background, since they,
+as being conceptions taken over from the past, conceal rather than reveal
+what is most essential in His personality. The primary need is to
+discover, behind the phenomenal, the real character of the personality and
+preaching of Jesus. The starting-point must therefore be the simple fact
+that Jesus came as a living Man into a dead world. He is living, because
+in contrast with His contemporaries He has a living idea of God. His faith
+in the Fatherhood of God is Jesus' most essential act. It signifies a
+breach with the transcendental Jewish idea of God, and an unconscious
+inner negation of the Jewish eschatology. Jesus, therefore, walks through
+a world which denies His own eschatology like a man who has firm ground
+under his feet.
+
+That which on a superficial view appears to be eschatological preaching
+turns out to be essentially a renewal of the old prophetic preaching with
+its positive ethical emphasis. Jesus is a manifestation of that ancient
+spontaneous piety of which Bousset had shown the existence in Late
+Judaism.
+
+The most characteristic thing in the character of Jesus, according to
+Bousset, is His joy in life. It is true that if, in endeavouring to
+understand Him, we take primitive Christianity as our starting-point, we
+might conceive of this joy in life as the complement of the eschatological
+mood, as the extreme expression of indifference to the world, which can as
+well enjoy the world as flee it. But the purely eschatological attitude,
+though it reappears in early Christianity, does not give the right clue
+for the interpretation of the character of Jesus as a whole. His joy in
+the world was real, a genuine outcome of His new type of piety. It
+prevented the eudaemonistic eschatological idea of reward, which some
+think they find in Jesus' preaching, from ever really becoming an element
+in it.
+
+Jesus is best understood by contrasting Him with the Baptist. John was a
+preacher of repentance whose eyes were fixed upon the future. Jesus did
+not allow the thought of the nearness of the end to rob Him of His
+simplicity and spontaneity, and was not crippled by the reflection that
+everything was transitory, preparatory, a mere means to an end. His
+preaching of repentance was not gloomy and forbidding; it was the
+proclamation of a new righteousness, of which the watchword was, "Ye shall
+be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect." He desires to communicate
+this personal piety by personal influence. In contrast with the Baptist He
+never aims at influencing masses of men, but rather avoids it. His work
+was accomplished mainly among little groups and individuals. He left the
+task of carrying the Gospel far and wide as a legacy to the community of
+His followers. The mission of the Twelve, conceived as a mission for the
+rapid and widespread extension of the Gospel, is not to be used to explain
+Jesus' methods of teaching; the narrative of it rests on an "obscure and
+unintelligible tradition."
+
+This genuine joy in life was not unnoticed by the contemporaries of Jesus
+who contrasted Him as "a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber," with the
+Baptist. They were vaguely conscious that the whole life of Jesus was
+"sustained by the feeling of an absolute antithesis between Himself and
+His times." He lived not in anxious expectation, but in cheerful gladness,
+because by the native strength of His piety He had brought present and
+future into one. Free from all extravagant Jewish delusions about the
+future, He was not paralysed by the conditions which must be fulfilled to
+make this future present. He has a peculiar conviction of its coming which
+gives Him courage to "marry" the present with the future. The present as
+contrasted with the beyond is for Him no mere shadow, but truth and
+reality; life is not for Him a mere illusion, but is charged with a real
+and valuable meaning. His own time is the Messianic time, as His answer to
+the Baptist's question shows. "And it is among the most certain things in
+the Gospel that Jesus in His earthly life acknowledged Himself as Messiah
+both to His disciples and to the High-Priest, and made His entry into
+Jerusalem as such."
+
+He can, therefore, fully recognise the worth of the present. It is not
+true that He taught that this world's goods were in themselves bad; what
+He said was only that they must not be put first. Indeed He gives a new
+value to life by teaching that man cannot be righteous in isolation, but
+only in the fellowship of love. And as, moreover, the righteousness which
+He preaches is one of the goods of the Kingdom of God, He cannot have
+thought of the Kingdom as wholly transcendental. The Reign of God begins
+for Him in the present era. His consciousness of being able to cast out
+demons in the spirit of God because Satan's kingdom on earth is at an end
+is only the supernaturalistic expression for something of which He also
+possesses an ethical consciousness, namely, that in the new social
+righteousness the Kingdom of God is already present.
+
+This presence of the Kingdom was not, however, clearly explained by Jesus,
+but was set forth in paradoxes and parables, especially in the parables of
+Mark iv. When we find the Evangelist, in immediate connexion with these
+parables, asserting that the aim of the parables was to mystify and
+conceal, we may conclude that the basis of this theory is the fact that
+these parables concerning the presence of the Kingdom of God were not
+understood.
+
+In effecting this tacit transformation Jesus is acting in accordance with
+a tendency of the time. Apocalyptic is itself a spiritualisation of the
+ancient Israelitish hopes of the future, and Jesus only carries this
+process to its completion. He raises Late Judaism above the limitations in
+which it was involved, separates out the remnant of national, political,
+and sensuous ideas which still clung to the expectation of the future in
+spite of its having been spiritualised by apocalyptic, and breaks with the
+Jewish particularism, though without providing a theoretical basis for
+this step.
+
+Thus, in spite of, nay even because of, His opposition to it, Jesus was
+the fulfiller of Judaism. In Him were united the ancient and vigorous
+prophetic religion and the impulse which Judaism itself had begun to feel
+towards the spiritualisation of the future hope. The transcendental and
+the actual meet in a unity which is full of life and strength, creative
+not reflective, and therefore not needing to set aside the ancient
+traditional ideas by didactic explanations, but overcoming them almost
+unconsciously by the truth which lies in this paradoxical union. The
+historical formula embodied in Bousset's closing sentence runs thus: "The
+Gospel develops some of the deeper-lying _motifs_ of the Old Testament,
+but it protests against the prevailing tendency of Judaism."
+
+Such of the underlying assumptions of this construction as invite
+challenge lie open to inspection, and do not need to be painfully
+disentangled from a web of exegesis; that is one of the merits of the
+book. The chief points to be queried are as follows:--
+
+Is it the case that the apocalypses mark the introduction of a process of
+spiritualisation applied to the ancient Israelitish hopes? A picture of
+the future is not spiritualised simply by being projected upon the clouds.
+This elevation to the transcendental region signifies, on the contrary,
+the transference to a place of safety of the eudaemonistic aspirations
+which have not been fulfilled in the present, and which are expected, by
+way of compensation, from the other world. The apocalyptic conception is
+so far from being a spiritualisation of the future expectations, that it
+represents on the contrary the last desperate effort of a strongly
+eudaemonistic popular religion to raise to heaven the earthly goods from
+which it cannot make up its mind to part.
+
+Next we must ask: Is it really necessary to assume the existence of so
+wide reaching a Persian influence in Jewish eschatology? The Jewish
+dualism and the sublimation of its hope have become historical just
+because, owing to the fate of the nation, the religious life of the
+present and the fair future which was logically bound up with it became
+more and more widely separated, temporally and locally, until at last only
+its dualism and the sublimation of its hope enabled the nation to survive
+its disappointment.
+
+Again, is it historically permissible to treat the leading ideas of the
+preaching of Jesus, which bear so clearly the marks of the contemporary
+mould of thought, as of secondary importance for the investigation, and to
+endeavour to trace Jesus' thoughts from within outwards and not from
+without inwards?
+
+Further, is there really in Judaism no tendency towards the overcoming of
+particularism? Has not its eschatology, as shaped by the deutero-prophetic
+literature, a universalistic outlook? Did Jesus overcome particularism in
+principle otherwise than it is overcome in Jewish eschatology, that is to
+say, with reference to the future?
+
+What is there to prove that Jesus' distinctive faith in the Fatherhood of
+God ever existed independently, and not as an alternative form of the
+historically-conditioned Messianic consciousness? In other words, what is
+there to show that the "religious attitude" of Jesus and His Messianic
+consciousness are anything else than identical, temporally and
+conceptually, so that the first must always be understood as conditioned
+by the second?
+
+Again, is the saying about the gluttonous man and wine-bibber a sufficient
+basis for the contrast between Jesus and the Baptist? Is not Jesus'
+preaching of repentance gloomy as well as the Baptist's? Where do we read
+that He, in contrast with the Baptist, avoided dealing with masses of men?
+Where did He give "the community of His disciples" marching orders to go
+far and wide in the sense required by Bousset's argument? Where is there a
+word to tell us that He thought of His work among individuals and little
+groups of men as the most important feature of His ministry? Are we not
+told the exact contrary, that He "taught" His disciples as little as He
+did the people? Is there any justification for characterising the
+missionary journey of the Twelve, just because it directly contradicts
+this view, as "an obscure and unintelligible tradition?"
+
+Is it so certain that Jesus made a Messianic entry into Jerusalem, and
+that, accordingly, He declared Himself to the disciples and to the High
+Priest as Messiah in the present, and not in a purely future sense?
+
+What are the sayings which justify us in making the attitude of opposition
+which He took up towards the Rabbinic legalism into a "sense of the
+absolute opposition between Himself and His people"? The very "absolute,"
+with its ring of Schleiermacher, is suspicious.
+
+All these, however, are subsidiary positions. The decisive point is: Can
+Bousset make good the assertion that Jesus' joy in life was a more or less
+unconscious inner protest against the purely eschatological world-
+renouncing religious attitude, the primal expression of that "absolute"
+antithesis to Judaism? Is it not the case that His attitude towards
+earthly goods was wholly conditioned by eschatology? That is to say, were
+not earthly goods emptied of any essential value in such a way that joy in
+the world and indifference to the world were simply the final expression
+of an ironic attitude which had been sublimated into pure serenity. That
+is the question upon the answer to which depends the decision whether
+Bousset's position is tenable or not.
+
+It is not in fact tenable, for the opposite view has at its disposal
+inexhaustible reserves of world-renouncing, world-contemning sayings, and
+the few utterances which might possibly be interpreted as expressing a
+purely positive joy in the world, desert and go over to the enemy, because
+they textually and logically belong to the other set of sayings. Finally,
+the promise of earthly happiness as a reward, to which Bousset had denied
+a position in the teaching of Jesus, also falls upon his rear, and that in
+the very moment when he is seeking to prove from the saying, "Seek ye
+first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall
+be added unto you," that for Jesus this world's goods are not in
+themselves evil, but are only to be given a secondary place. Here the
+eudaemonism is written on the forehead of the saying, since the receiving
+of these things--we must remember, too, the "hundredfold" in another
+passage--is future, not present, and will only "come" at the same time as
+the Kingdom of God. All present goods, on the other hand, serve only to
+support life and render possible an undistracted attitude of waiting in
+pious hope for that future, and therefore are not thought of as gains, but
+purely as a gift of God, to be cheerfully and freely enjoyed as a
+foretaste of those blessings which the elect are to enjoy in the future
+Divine dispensation.
+
+The loss of this position decides the further point that if there is any
+suggestion in the teaching of Jesus that the future Kingdom of God is in
+some sense present, it is not to be understood as implying an anti-
+eschatological acceptance of the world, but merely as a phenomenon
+indicative of the extreme tension of the eschatological consciousness,
+just in the same way as His joy in the world. Bousset has a kind of
+indirect recognition of this in his remark that the presence of the
+Kingdom of God is only asserted by Jesus as a kind of paradox. If the
+assertion of its presence indicated that acceptance of the world formed
+part of Jesus' system of thought, it would be at variance with His
+eschatology. But the paradoxical character of the assertion is due
+precisely to the fact that His acceptance of the world is but the last
+expression of the completeness with which He rejects it.
+
+But what do critical cavils matter in the case of a book of which the
+force, the influence, the greatness, depends upon its spirit? It is great
+because it recognises--what is so rarely recognised in theological
+works--the point where the main issue really lies; in the question, namely,
+whether Jesus preached and worked as Messiah, or whether, as follows if a
+prominent place is given to eschatology, as Colani had long ago
+recognised, His career, historically regarded, was only the career of a
+prophet with an undercurrent of Messianic consciousness.
+
+As a consequence of grasping the question in its full significance,
+Bousset rejects all the little devices by which previous writers had
+endeavoured to relate Jesus' ministry to His times, each one prescribing
+at what point He was to connect Himself with it, and of course proceeding
+in his book to represent Him as connecting Himself with it in precisely
+that way. Bousset recognises that the supreme importance of eschatology in
+the teaching of Jesus is not to be got rid of by whittling away a little
+point here and there, and rubbing it smooth with critical sandpaper until
+it is capable of reflecting a different thought, but only by fully
+admitting it, while at the same time counteracting it by asserting a
+mysterious element of world-acceptance in the thought of Jesus, and
+conceiving His whole teaching as a kind of alternating current between
+positive and negative poles.
+
+This is the last possible sincere attempt to limit the exclusive
+importance of eschatology in the preaching of Jesus, an attempt so
+gallant, so brilliant, that its failure is almost tragic; one could have
+wished success to the book, to which Carlyle might have stood sponsor.
+That it is inspired by the spirit of Carlyle, that it vindicates the
+original force of a great Personality against the attempt to dissolve it
+into a congeries of contemporary conceptions, therein lies at once its
+greatness and its weakness. Bousset vindicates Jesus, not for history, but
+for Protestantism, by making Him the heroic representative of a deeply
+religious acceptance of the goods of life amid an apocalyptic world. His
+study is not unhistorical, but supra-historical. The spirit of Jesus was
+in fact world-accepting in the sense that through the experience of
+centuries it advanced historically to the acceptance of the world, since
+nothing can appear phenomenally which is not in some sense ideally present
+from the first. But the teaching of the historical Jesus was purely and
+exclusively world-renouncing. If, therefore, the problem which Bousset has
+put on the blackboard for the eschatological school to solve is to be
+successfully solved, the solution is to be sought on other, more
+objectively historical, lines.
+
+That the decision of the question whether Jesus' preaching of the Kingdom
+of God is wholly eschatological or only partly eschatological, is
+primarily to be sought in His ethical teaching, is recognised by all the
+critics of Baldensperger and Weiss. They differ only in the importance
+which they assign to eschatology. But no other writer has grasped the
+problem as clearly as Bousset.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+The Parisian Ehrhardt emphasises eschatology very strongly in his work
+"The Fundamental Character of the Preaching of Jesus in Relation to the
+Messianic Hopes of His People and His own Messianic Consciousness."(166)
+Nevertheless he asserts the presence of a twofold ethic in Jesus'
+teaching: eschatology did not attempt to evacuate everything else of all
+value, but allowed the natural and ethical goods of this world to hold
+their place, as belonging to a world of thought which resisted its
+encroachments.
+
+A much more negative attitude is taken up by Albert Reville in his _Jesus
+de Nazareth_.(167) According to him both Apocalyptic and Messianism are
+foreign bodies in the teaching of Jesus which have been forced into it by
+the pressure of contemporary thought. Jesus would never of His own motion
+have taken up the role of Messiah.
+
+Wendt, too, in the second edition of his _Lehre Jesu_, which appeared in
+1903, held in the main to the fundamental idea of the first, the 1890,
+edition; namely, that Jesus in view of His purely religious relation to
+God could not do otherwise than transform, from within outwards, the
+traditional conceptions, even though they seem to be traceable in their
+actual contemporary form on the surface of His teaching. He had already,
+in 1893, in the _Christliche Welt_ clearly expounded, and defended against
+Weiss, his view of the Kingdom of God as already present for the thought
+of Jesus.
+
+The effect which Baldensperger and Weiss had upon Weiffenbach(168) was to
+cause him to bring out in full strength the apologetic aspect which had
+been somewhat held in check in his work of 1873 by the thoroughness of his
+exegesis. The apocalyptic of this younger school, which was no longer
+willing to believe that in the mouth of Jesus the Parousia meant nothing
+more than an issuing from death clothed with power, is on all grounds to
+be rejected. It assumes, since this expectation was not fulfilled, an
+error on the part of Jesus. It is better to rest content with not being
+able to see quite clearly.
+
+Protected by a similar armour, the successive editions of Bernhard Weiss's
+Life of Jesus went their way unmolested down to 1902.
+
+Not with an apologetic purpose, but on the basis of an original religious
+view, Titius, in his work on the New Testament doctrine of blessedness,
+develops the teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God as a present
+good.(169)
+
+In the same year, 1895, appeared E. Haupt's work on "The Eschatological
+Sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels."(170) In contradistinction to
+Bousset he takes as his starting-point the eschatological passages,
+examining each separately and modulating them back to the Johannine key.
+It is so delicately and ingeniously done that the reading of the book is
+an aesthetic pleasure which makes one in the end quite forget the
+apologetic _motif_ in order to surrender oneself completely to the
+author's mystical system of religious thought.
+
+It is, indeed, not the least service of the eschatological school that it
+compels modern theology, which is so much preoccupied with history, to
+reveal what is its own as its own. Eschatology makes it impossible to
+attribute modern ideas to Jesus and then by way of "New Testament
+Theology" take them back from Him as a loan, as even Ritschl not so long
+ago did with such _naivete_. Johannes Weiss, in cutting himself loose, as
+an historian, from Ritschl, and recognising that "the real roots of
+Ritschl's ideas are to be found in Kant and the illuminist theology,"(171)
+introduced the last decisive phase of the process of separation between
+historical and "modern" theology. Before the advent of eschatology,
+critical theology was, in the last resort, without a principle of
+discrimination, since it possessed no reagent capable of infallibly
+separating out modern ideas on the one hand and genuinely ancient New
+Testament ideas on the other. The application of the criterion has now
+begun. What will be the issue, the future alone can show.
+
+But even now we can recognise that the separation was not only of
+advantage to historical theology; for modern theology, the manifestation
+of the modern spirit as it really is, was still more important. Only when
+it became conscious of its own inmost essence and of its right to exist,
+only when it freed itself from its illegitimate historical justification,
+which, leaping over the centuries, appealed directly to an historical
+exposition of the New Testament, only then could it unfold its full wealth
+of ideas, which had been hitherto root-bound by a false historicity. It
+was not by chance that in Bousset's reply a certain affirmation of life,
+something expressive of the genius of Protestantism, cries aloud as never
+before in any theological work of this generation, or that in Haupt's work
+German mysticism interweaves its mysterious harmonies with the Johannine
+_motif_. The contribution of Protestantism to the interpretation of the
+world had never been made so manifest in any work prior to Weiss's. The
+modern spirit is here breaking in wreaths of foam upon the sharp cliffs of
+the rock-bound eschatological world-view of Jesus. To put it more
+prosaically, modern theology is at last about to become sincere. But this
+is so far only a prophecy of the future.
+
+If we are to speak of the present it must be fully admitted that even
+historical science, when it desires to continue the history of
+Christianity beyond the life of Jesus, cannot help protesting against the
+one-sidedness of the eschatological world of thought of the "Founder." It
+finds itself obliged to distinguish in the thought of Jesus "permanent
+elements and transitory elements" which, being interpreted, means
+eschatological and not essentially eschatological materials; otherwise it
+can get no farther. For if Jesus' world of thought was wholly and
+exclusively eschatological, there can only have arisen out of it, as
+Reimarus long ago maintained, an exclusively eschatological primitive
+Christianity. But how a community of that kind could give birth to the
+Greek non-eschatological theology no Church history and no history of
+dogma has so far shown. Instead of that they all--Harnack, with the most
+consummate historical ability--lay down from the very first, alongside of
+the main line intended for "contemporary views" traffic, a relief line for
+the accommodation of through trains of "non-temporally limited ideas"; and
+at the point where primitive Christian eschatology becomes of less
+importance they switch off the train to the relief line, after slipping
+the carriages which are not intended to go beyond that station.
+
+This procedure has now been rendered impossible for them by Weiss, who
+leaves no place in the teaching of Jesus for anything but the single-line
+traffic of eschatology. If, during the last fifteen years, any one had
+attempted to carry out in a work on a large scale the plan of Strauss and
+Renan, linking up the history of the life of Jesus with the history of
+early Christianity, and New Testament theology with the early history of
+dogma, the immense difficulties which Weiss had raised without suspecting
+it, in the course of his sixty-seven pages, would have become clearly
+apparent. The problem of the Hellenisation of Christianity took on quite a
+new aspect when the trestle bridge of modern ideas connecting the
+eschatological early Christianity with Greek theology broke down under the
+weight of the newly-discovered material, and it became necessary to seek
+within the history itself an explanation of the way in which an
+exclusively eschatological system of ideas came to admit Greek influences,
+and--what is much more difficult to explain--how Hellenism, on its part,
+found any point of contact with an eschatological sect.
+
+The new problem is as yet hardly recognised, much less grappled with. The
+few who since Weiss's time have sought to pass over from the life of Jesus
+to early Christianity, have acted like men who find themselves on an ice-
+floe which is slowly dividing into two pieces, and who leap from one to
+the other before the cleft grows too wide. Harnack, in his "What is
+Christianity?" almost entirely ignores the contemporary limitations of
+Jesus' teaching, and starts out with a Gospel which carries him down
+without difficulty to the year 1899. The anti-historical violence of this
+procedure is, if possible, still more pronounced in Wernle. The
+"Beginnings of our Religion"(172) begins by putting the Jewish eschatology
+in a convenient posture for the coming operation by urging that the idea
+of the Messiah, since there was no appropriate place for it in connexion
+with the Kingdom of God or the new Earth, had become obsolete for the Jews
+themselves.
+
+The inadequateness of the Messianic idea for the purposes of Jesus is
+therefore self-evident. "His whole life long"--as if we knew any more of it
+than the few months of His public ministry!--"He laboured to give a new and
+higher content to the Messianic title which He had adopted." In the course
+of this endeavour He discarded "the Messiah of the Zealots"--by that is
+meant the political non-transcendent Messianic ideal. As if we had any
+knowledge of the existence of such an ideal in the time of Jesus! The
+statements of Josephus suggest, and the conduct of Pilate at the trial of
+Jesus confirms the conclusion, that in none of the risings did a claimant
+of the Messiahship come forward, and this should be proof enough that
+there did not exist at that time a political eschatology alongside of the
+transcendental, and indeed it could not on inner grounds subsist alongside
+of it. That was, after all, the thing which Weiss had shown most clearly!
+
+Jesus, therefore, had dismissed the Messiah of the Zealots; He had now to
+turn Himself into the "waiting" Messiah of the Rabbis. Yet He does not
+altogether accept this role, for He works actively as Messiah. His
+struggle with the Messianic conception could not but end in transforming
+it. This transformed conception is introduced by Jesus to the people at
+His entry into Jerusalem, since His choice of the ass to bear Him
+inscribed as a motto, so to speak, over the demonstration the prophecy of
+the Messiah who should be a bringer of peace. A few days later He gives
+the Scribes to understand by His enigmatic words with reference to Mark
+xii. 37, that His Messiahship has nothing to do with Davidic descent and
+all that that implied.
+
+The Kingdom of God was not, of course, for Him, according to Wernle, a
+purely eschatological entity; He saw in many events evidence that it had
+already dawned. Wernle's only real concession to the eschatological school
+is the admission that the Kingdom always remained for Jesus a supernatural
+entity.
+
+The belief in the presence of the Kingdom was, it seems, only a phase in
+the development of Jesus. When confronted with growing opposition He
+abandoned this belief again, and the super-earthly future character of the
+Kingdom was all that remained. At the end of His career Jesus establishes
+a connexion between the Messianic conception, in its final transformation,
+and the Kingdom, which had retained its eschatological character; He goes
+to His death for the Messiahship in its new significance, but He goes on
+believing in His speedy return as the Son of Man. This expectation of His
+Parousia as Son of Man, which only emerges immediately before His exit
+from the world--when it can no longer embarrass the author in his account
+of the preaching of Jesus--is the only point in which Jesus does not
+overcome the inadequacy of the Messianic idea with which He had to deal.
+"At this point the fantastic conception of Late Judaism, the magically
+transformed world of the ancient popular belief, thrusts itself
+incongruously into Jesus' great and simple consciousness of His vocation."
+
+Thus Wernle takes with him only so much of Apocalyptic as he can safely
+carry over into early Christianity. Once he has got safely across, he
+drags the rest over after him. He shows that in and with the titles and
+expressions borrowed from apocalyptic thought, Messiah, Son of God, Son of
+Man, which were all at bottom so inappropriate to Jesus, early
+Christianity slipped in again "either the old ideas or new ones
+misunderstood." In pointing this out he cannot refrain from the customary
+sigh of regret--these apocalyptic titles and expressions "were from the
+first a misfortune for the new religion." One may well ask how Wernle has
+discovered in the preaching of Jesus anything that can be called,
+historically, a new religion, and what would have become of this new
+religion apart from its apocalyptic hopes and its apocalyptic dogma? We
+answer: without its intense eschatological hope the Gospel would have
+perished from the earth, crushed by the weight of historic catastrophes.
+But, as it was, by the mighty power of evoking faith which lay in it,
+eschatology made good in the darkest times Jesus' sayings about the
+imperishability of His words, and died as soon as these sayings had
+brought forth new life upon a new soil. Why then make such a complaint
+against it?
+
+The tragedy does not consist in the modification of primitive Christianity
+by eschatology, but in the fate of eschatology itself, which has preserved
+for us all that is most precious in Jesus, but must itself wither, because
+He died upon the cross with a loud cry, despairing of bringing in the new
+heaven and the new earth--that is the real tragedy. And not a tragedy to be
+dismissed with a theologian's sigh, but a liberating and life-giving
+influence, like every great tragedy. For in its death-pangs eschatology
+bore to the Greek genius a wonder-child, the mystic, sensuous, Early-
+Christian doctrine of immortality, and consecrated Christianity as the
+religion of immortality to take the place of the slowly dying civilisation
+of the ancient world.
+
+But it is not only those who want to find a way from the preaching of
+Jesus to early Christianity who are conscious of the peculiar difficulties
+raised by the recognition of its purely Jewish eschatological character,
+but also those who wish to reconstruct the connexion backwards from Jesus
+to Judaism. For example, Wellhausen and Schuerer repudiate the results
+arrived at by the eschatological school, which, on its part, bases itself
+upon their researches into Late Judaism. Wellhausen, in his "Israelitish
+and Jewish History,"(173) gives a picture of Jesus which lifts Him out of
+the Jewish frame altogether. The Kingdom which He desires to found becomes
+a present spiritual entity. To the Jewish eschatology His preaching stands
+in a quite external relation, for what was in His mind was rather a
+fellowship of spiritual men engaged in seeking a higher righteousness. He
+did not really desire to be the Messiah, and in His inmost heart had
+renounced the hopes of His people. If He called Himself Messiah, it was in
+view of a higher Messianic ideal. For the people His acceptance of the
+Messiahship denoted the supersession of their own very differently
+coloured expectation. The transcendental events become immanent. In regard
+to the apocalyptic Judgment of the World, he retains only the sermon
+preserved by John about the inward and constant process of separation.
+
+Although not to the same extent, Schuerer also, in his view of the teaching
+of Jesus, is strongly influenced by the Fourth Gospel. In an inaugural
+discourse of 1903(174) he declares that in his opinion there is a certain
+opposition between Judaism and the preaching of Jesus, since the latter
+contains something absolutely new. His Messiahship is only the temporally
+limited expression of a unique, generally ethical, consciousness of being
+a child of God, which has a certain analogy with the relation of all God's
+children to their Heavenly Father. The reason for His reserve in regard to
+His Messiahship was, according to Schuerer, Jesus' fear of kindling
+"political enthusiasm"; from the same motive He repudiates in Mark xii. 37
+all claim to be the Messiah of David's line. The ideas of the Messiah and
+the Kingdom of God at least underwent a transformation in His use of them.
+If in His earlier preaching He only announces the Kingdom as something
+future, in His later preaching He emphasises the thought that in its
+beginnings it is already present.
+
+That it is precisely the representatives of the study of Late Judaism who
+lift Jesus out of the Late-Jewish world of thought, is not in itself a
+surprising phenomenon. It is only an expression of the fact that here
+something new and creative enters into an uncreative age, and of the clear
+consciousness that this Personality cannot be resolved into a complex of
+contemporary ideas. The problem of which they are conscious is the same as
+Bousset's. But the question cannot be avoided whether the violent
+separation of Jesus from Late Judaism is a real solution, or whether the
+very essence of Jesus' creative power does not consist, not in taking out
+one or other of the parts of the eschatological machinery, but in doing
+what no one had previously done, namely, in setting the whole machinery in
+motion by the application of an ethico-religious motive power. To perceive
+the unsatisfactoriness of the transformation hypothesis it is only
+necessary to think of all the conditions which would have to be realised
+in order to make it possible to trace, even in general outline, the
+evidence of such a transformation in the Gospel narrative.
+
+All these solutions of the eschatological question start from the teaching
+of Jesus, and it was, indeed, from this point of view that Johannes Weiss
+had stated the problem. The final decision of the question is not,
+however, to be found here, but in the examination of the whole course of
+Jesus' life. On which of the two presuppositions, the assumption that His
+life was completely dominated by eschatology, or the assumption that He
+repudiated it, do we find it easiest to understand the connexion of events
+in the life of Jesus, His fate, and the emergence of the expectation of
+the Parousia in the community of His disciples?
+
+The works which in the examination of the connexion of events follow a
+critical procedure are few and far between. The average "Life of Jesus"
+shows in this respect an inconceivable stupidity. The first, after Bruno
+Bauer, to apply critical methods to this point was Volkmar; between
+Volkmar and Wrede the only writer who here showed himself critical, that
+is sceptical, was W. Brandt. His work on the "Gospel History"(175)
+appeared in 1893, a year after Johannes Weiss's work and in the same year
+as Bousset's reply. In this book the question of the absolute, or only
+partial, dominance of eschatology is answered on the ground of the general
+course of Jesus' life.
+
+Brandt goes to work with a truly Cartesian scepticism. He first examines
+all the possibilities that the reported event did not happen in the way in
+which it is reported before he is satisfied that it really did happen in
+that way. Before he can accept the statement that Jesus died with a loud
+outcry, he has to satisfy his critical conscience by the following
+consideration: "The statement regarding this cry, is, so far as I can see,
+to be best explained by supposing that it was really uttered." The burial
+of Jesus owes its acceptance as history to the following reflection. "We
+hold Joseph of Arimathea to be an historical person; but the only reason
+which the narrative has for preserving his name is that he buried Jesus.
+Therefore the name guarantees the fact."
+
+But the moment the slightest possibility presents itself that the event
+happened in a different way, Brandt declines to be held by any seductions
+of the text, and makes his own "probably" into an historical fact. For
+instance, he thinks it unlikely that Peter was the only one to smite with
+the sword; so the history is immediately rectified by the phrase "that
+sword-stroke was doubtless not the only one, other disciples also must
+have pressed to the front." That Jesus was first condemned by the
+Sanhedrin at a night-sitting, and that Pilate in the morning confirmed the
+sentence, seems to him on various grounds impossible. It is therefore
+decided that we have here to do only with a combination devised by "a
+Christian from among the Gentiles." In this way the "must have been's" and
+"may have been's" exercise a veritable reign of terror throughout the
+book.
+
+Yet that does not prevent the general contribution of the book to
+criticism from being a very remarkable one. Especially in regard to the
+trial of Jesus, it brings to light a whole series of previously
+unsuspected problems. Brandt is the first writer since Bauer who dares to
+assert that it is an historical absurdity to suppose that Pilate, when the
+people demanded from him the _condemnation_ of Jesus, answered: "No, but I
+will _release_ you another instead of Him."
+
+As his starting-point he takes the complete contrast between the Johannine
+and Synoptic traditions, and the inherent impossibility of the former is
+proved in detail. The Synoptic tradition goes back to Mark alone. His
+Gospel is, as was also held by Bruno Bauer, and afterwards by Wrede, a
+sufficient basis for the whole tradition. But this Gospel is not a purely
+historical source, it is also, and in a very much larger degree, poetic
+invention. Of the real history of Jesus but little is preserved in the
+Gospels. Many of the so-called sayings of the Lord are certainly to be
+pronounced spurious, a few are probably to be recognised as genuine. But
+the theory of the "poetic invention" of the earliest Evangelist is not
+consistently carried out, because Brandt does not take as his criterion,
+as Wrede did later, a definite principle on which Mark is supposed to have
+constructed his Gospel, but decides each case separately. Consequently the
+most important feature of the work lies in the examination of detail.
+
+Jesus died and was believed to have risen again: this is the only
+absolutely certain information that we have regarding His "Life." And
+accordingly this is the crucial instance for testing the worth of the
+Gospel tradition. It is only on the basis of an elaborate criticism of the
+accounts of the suffering and resurrection of Jesus that Brandt undertakes
+to give a sketch of the life of Jesus as it really was.
+
+What was, then, so far as appears from His life, Jesus' attitude towards
+eschatology? It was, according to Brandt, a self-contradictory attitude.
+"He believed in the near approach of the Kingdom of God, and yet, as
+though its time were still far distant, He undertakes the training of
+disciples. He was a teacher and yet is said to have held Himself to be the
+Messiah." The duality lies not so much in the teaching itself; it is
+rather a cleavage between His conviction and consciousness on the one
+hand, and His public attitude on the other.
+
+To this observation we have to add a second, namely, that Jesus cannot
+possibly during the last few days at Jerusalem have come forward as
+Messiah. Critics, with the exception, of course, of Bruno Bauer, had only
+cursorily touched on this question. The course of events in the last few
+days in Jerusalem does not at all suggest a Messianic claim on the part of
+Jesus, indeed it directly contradicts it. Only imagine what would have
+happened if Jesus had come before the people with such claims, or even if
+such thoughts had been so much as attributed to Him! On the other side, of
+course, we have the report of the Messianic entry, in which Jesus not only
+accepted the homage offered to Him as Messiah, but went out of His way to
+invite it; and the people must therefore from that point onwards have
+regarded him as Messiah. In consequence of this contradiction in the
+narrative, all Lives of Jesus slur over the passage, and seem to represent
+that the people sometimes suspected Jesus' Messiahship, sometimes did not
+suspect it, or they adopt some other similar expedient. Brandt, however,
+rigorously drew the logical inference. Since Jesus did not stand and
+preach in the temple as Messiah, He cannot have entered Jerusalem as
+Messiah. Therefore "the well-known Messianic entry is not historical."
+That is also implied by the manner of His arrest. If Jesus had come
+forward as a Messianic claimant, He would not simply have been arrested by
+the civil police; Pilate would have had to suppress a revolt by military
+force.
+
+This admission implies the surrender of one of the most cherished
+prejudices of the anti-eschatological school, namely, that Jesus raised
+the thoughts of the people to a higher conception of His Messiahship, and
+consequently to a spiritual view of the Kingdom of God, or at least tried
+so to raise them. But we cannot assume this to have been His intention,
+since He does not allow the multitude to suspect His Messiahship. Thus the
+conception of a "transformation" becomes untenable as a means of
+reconciling eschatological and non-eschatological elements. And as a
+matter of fact--that is the stroke of critical genius in the book--Brandt
+lets the two go forward side by side without any attempt at
+reconciliation; for the reconciliation which would be possible if one had
+only to deal with the teaching of Jesus becomes impossible when one has to
+take in His life as well. For Brandt the life of Jesus is the life of a
+Galilaean teacher who, in consequence of the eschatology with which the
+period was so fully charged, was for a time and to a certain extent set at
+variance with Himself and who met His fate for that reason. This
+conception is at bottom identical with Renan's. But the stroke of genius
+in leaving the gap between eschatological and non-eschatological elements
+unbridged sets this work, as regards its critical foundation and
+historical presentment, high above the smooth romance of the latter.
+
+The course of Jesus' life, according to Brandt, was therefore as follows:
+Jesus was a teacher; not only so, but He took disciples in order to train
+them to be teachers. "This is in itself sufficient to show there was a
+period in His life in which His work was not determined by the thought of
+the immediate nearness of the decisive moment. He sought men, therefore,
+who might become His fellow-workers. He began to train disciples who, if
+He did not Himself live to see the Day of the Lord, would be able after
+His death to carry on the work of educating the people along the lines
+which He had laid down." "Then there occurred in Judaea an event of which
+the rumour spread like wildfire throughout Palestine. A prophet arose--a
+thing which had not happened for centuries--a man who came forward as an
+envoy of God; and this prophet proclaimed the immediate coming of the
+reign of God: 'Repent that ye may escape the wrath of God.' " The
+Baptist's great sermon on repentance falls, according to Brandt, in the
+last period of the life of Jesus. We must assume, he thinks, that before
+John came forward in this dramatic fashion he had been a teacher, and at
+that period of his life had numbered Jesus among his pupils. Nevertheless
+his life previous to his public appearance must have been a rather obscure
+one. When he suddenly launched out into this eschatological preaching of
+repentance "he seemed like an Elijah who had long ago been rapt away from
+the earth and now appeared once more."
+
+From this point onwards Jesus had to concentrate His activity, for the
+time was short. If He desired to effect anything and so far as possible to
+make the people, before the coming of the end, obedient to the will of
+God, He must make Jerusalem the starting-point of His work. "Only from
+this central position, and only with the help of an authority which had at
+its disposal the whole synagogal system, could He effect within a short
+time much, perhaps all, of what was needful. So He determined on
+journeying to Jerusalem with this end in view, and with the fixed resolve
+there to carry into effect the will of God."
+
+The journey to Jerusalem was not therefore a pilgrimage of death. "So long
+as we are obliged to take the Gospels as a true reflection of the history
+of Jesus we must recognise with Weizsaecker that Jesus did not go to
+Jerusalem in order to be put to death there, nor did He go to keep the
+Feast. Both suppositions are excluded by the vigour of his action in
+Jerusalem, and the bright colours of hope with which the picture of that
+period was painted in the recollection of those who had witnessed it." We
+cannot therefore regard the predictions of the Passion as historical, or
+"at most we might perhaps suppose that Jesus in the consciousness of His
+innocence may have said to His disciples: 'If I should die, may God for
+the sake of My blood be merciful to you and to the people.'"
+
+He went to Jerusalem, then, to fulfil the will of God. "It was God's will
+that the preaching by which alone the people could be inwardly renewed and
+made into a real people of God should be recognised and organised by the
+national and religious authorities. To effect this through the existing
+authorities, or to realise it in some other way, such was the task which
+Jesus felt Himself called on to perform." With his eyes upon this goal,
+behind which lay the near approach of the Kingdom of God, He set His face
+towards Jerusalem.
+
+"But nothing could be more natural than that out of the belief that He was
+engaged in a work which God had willed, there should arise an ever
+stronger belief in His personal vocation." It was thus that the Messianic
+consciousness entered into Jesus' thoughts. His conviction of His vocation
+had nothing to do with a political Messiahship, it was only gradually from
+the development of events that He was able to draw the inference that He
+was destined to the Messianic sovereignty, "it may have become more and
+more clear to Him, but it did not become a matter of absolute certainty."
+It was only amid opposition, in deep dejection, in consequence of a
+powerful inner reaction against circumstances, that He came to recognise
+Himself with full conviction as the anointed of God.
+
+When it began to be bruited about that He was the Messiah, the rulers had
+Him arrested and handed Him over to the Procurator. Judas the traitor "had
+only been a short time among His followers, and only in those unquiet days
+at Jerusalem when the Master had scarcely any opportunity for private
+intercourse with him and for learning really to know him. He had not been
+with Jesus during the Galilaean days, and Jesus was consequently nothing
+more to him than the future ruler of the Kingdom of God."
+
+After His death the disciples "could not, unless something occurred to
+restore their faith, continue to believe in His Messiahship." Jesus had
+taken away with Him in His death the hopes which they had set upon Him,
+especially as He had not foretold His death, much less His resurrection.
+"At first, therefore, it would be all in favour of His memory if the
+disciples remembered that He Himself had never openly and definitely
+declared Himself to be the Messiah." They returned to Galilee. "Simon
+Peter, and perhaps the son of Zebedee, who afterwards ranked along with
+him as a pillar of the Church, resolved to continue that preparation for
+their work which had been interrupted by their journey to Jerusalem. It
+seemed to them that if they were once more on Galilaean soil the days
+which they had spent in the inhospitable Jerusalem would cease to oppress
+their spirits with the leaden weight of sorrowful recollection.... One
+might almost say that they had to make up their minds to give up Jesus the
+author of the attempt to take Jerusalem by storm; but for Jesus the
+gracious gentle Galilaean teacher they kept a warm place in their hearts."
+So love watched over the dead until hope was rekindled by the Old
+Testament promises and came to reawaken Him. "The first who, in an
+enthusiastic vision, saw this wish fulfilled was Simon Peter." This
+"resurrection" has nothing to do with the empty grave, which, like the
+whole narrative of the Jerusalem appearances, only came into the tradition
+later. The first appearances took place in Galilee. It was there that the
+Church was founded.
+
+This attempt to grasp the connexion of events in the life of Jesus from a
+purely historical point of view is one of the most important that have
+ever been made in this department of study. If it had been put in a purely
+constructive form, this criticism would have made an impression unequalled
+by any other Life of Jesus since Renan's. But in that case it would have
+lost that free play of ideas which the critical recognition of the
+unbridged gap admits. The eschatological question is not, it is true,
+decided by this investigation. It shows the impossibility of the previous
+attempts to establish a present Messiahship of Jesus, but it shows, too,
+that the questions, which are really historical questions, concerning the
+public attitude of Jesus, are far from being solved by asserting the
+exclusively eschatological character of His preaching, but that new
+difficulties are always presenting themselves.
+
+It was perhaps not so much through these general ethico-religious
+historical discussions as in consequence of certain exegetical problems
+which unexpectedly came to light that theologians became conscious that
+the old conception of the teaching of Jesus was not tenable, or was only
+tenable by violent means. On the assumption of the modified eschatological
+character of His teaching, Jesus is still a teacher; that is to say, He
+speaks in order to be understood, in order to explain, and has no secrets.
+But if His teaching is throughout eschatological, then He is a prophet,
+who points in mysterious speech to a coming age, whose words conceal
+secrets and offer enigmas, and are not intended to be understood always
+and by everybody. Attention was now turned to a number of passages in
+which the question arises whether Jesus had any secrets to keep or not.
+
+This question presents itself in connexion with the very earliest of the
+parables. In Mark iv. 11, 12 it is distinctly stated that the parables
+spoken in the immediate context embody the mystery of the Kingdom of God
+in an obscure and unintelligible form, in order that those for whom it is
+not intended may hear without understanding. But this is not borne out by
+the character of the parables themselves, since _we_ at least find in them
+the thought of the constant and victorious development of the Kingdom from
+small beginnings to its perfect development. After the passage had had to
+suffer many things from constantly renewed attempts to weaken down or
+explain away the statement, Juelicher, in his work upon the Parables,(176)
+released it from these tortures, left Jesus the parables in their natural
+meaning, and put down this unintelligible saying about the purpose of the
+parabolic form of discourse to the account of the Evangelist. He would
+rather, to use his own expression, remove a little stone from the masonry
+of tradition than a diamond from the imperishable crown of honour which
+belongs to Jesus. Yes, but, for all that, it is an arbitrary assumption
+which damages the Marcan hypothesis more than will be readily admitted.
+What was the reason, or what was the mistake which led the earliest
+Evangelist to form so repellent a theory regarding the purpose of the
+parables? Is the progressive exaggeration of the contrast between veiled
+and open speech, to which Juelicher often appeals, sufficient to account
+for it? How can the Evangelist have invented such a theory, when he
+immediately proceeds to invalidate it by the rationalising, rather
+commonplace explanation of the parable of the Sower?
+
+Bernhard Weiss, not being so much under the influence of modern theology
+as to feel bound to recognise the paedagogic purpose in Jesus, gives the
+text its due, and admits that Jesus intended to use the parabolic form of
+discourse as a means of separating receptive from unreceptive hearers. He
+does not say, however, what kind of secret, intelligible only to the
+predestined, was concealed in these parables which seem clear as daylight.
+
+That was before Johannes Weiss had stated the eschatological question.
+Bousset, in his criticism of the eschatological theory,(177) is obliged to
+fall back upon Juelicher's method in order to justify the rationalising
+modern way of explaining these parables as pointing to a Kingdom of God
+actually present. It is true Juelicher's explanation of the way in which
+the theory arose does not satisfy him; he prefers to assume that the basis
+of this false theory of Mark's is to be found in the fact that the
+parables concerning the presence of the Kingdom remained unintelligible to
+the contemporaries of Jesus. But we may fairly ask that he should point
+out the connecting link between that failure to understand and the
+invention of a saying like this, which implies so very much more!
+
+If there are no better grounds than that for calling in question Mark's
+theory of the parables, then the parables of Mark iv., the only ones from
+which it is possible to extract the admission of a present Kingdom of God,
+remain what they were before, namely, mysteries.
+
+The second volume of Juelicher's "Parables"(178) found the eschatological
+question already in possession of the field. And, as a matter of fact,
+Juelicher does abandon "the heretofore current method of modernising the
+parables," which finds in one after another of them only its own favourite
+conception of the slow and gradual development of the Kingdom of God. The
+Kingdom of Heaven is for Juelicher a completely supernatural idea; it is to
+be realised without human help and independently of the attitude of men,
+by the sole power of God. The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven
+are not intended to teach the disciples the necessity and wisdom of a
+development occupying a considerable time, but are designed to make clear
+and vivid to them the idea that the period of perfecting and fulfilment
+will follow with super-earthly necessity upon that of imperfection.
+
+But in general the new problem plays no very special part in Juelicher's
+exposition. He takes up, it might almost be said, in relation to the
+parables, too independent a position as a religious thinker to care to
+understand them against the background of a wholly different world-view,
+and does not hesitate to exclude from the authentic discourses of Jesus
+whatever does not suit him. This is the fate, for instance, of the parable
+of the wicked husbandmen in Mark xii. He finds in it traits which read
+like _vaticinia ex eventu_, and sees therefore in the whole thing only a
+prophetically expressed "view of the history as it presented itself to an
+average man who had been present at the crucifixion of Jesus and
+nevertheless believed in Him as the Son of God."
+
+But this absolute method of explanation, independent of any traditional
+order of time or events, makes it impossible for the author to draw from
+the parables any general system of teaching. He makes no distinction
+between the Galilaean mystical parables and the polemical, menacing
+Jerusalem parables. For instance, he supposes the parable of the Sower,
+which according to Mark was the very first of Jesus' parabolic discourses,
+to have been spoken as the result of a melancholy review of a preceding
+period of work, and as expressing the conviction, stamped upon His mind by
+the facts, "that it was in accordance with higher laws that the word of
+God should have to reckon with defeats as well as victories." Accordingly
+he adopts in the main the explanation which the Evangelist gives in Mark
+iv. 13-20. The parable of the seed growing secretly is turned to account
+in favour of the "present" Kingdom of God.
+
+Juelicher has an incomparable power of striking fire out of every one of
+the parables, but the flame is of a different colour from that which it
+showed when Jesus pronounced the parables before the enchanted multitude.
+The problem posed by Johannes Weiss in connexion with the teaching of
+Jesus is treated by Juelicher only so far as it has a direct interest for
+the creative independence of his own religious thought.
+
+Alongside of the parabolic discourses of Mark iv. we have now to place, as
+a newly discovered problem, the discourse at the sending out of the Twelve
+in Matt. x. Up to the time of Johannes Weiss it had been possible to rest
+content with transplanting the gloomy sayings regarding persecutions to
+the last period of Jesus' life; but now there was the further difficulty
+to be met that while so hasty a proclamation of the Kingdom of God is
+quite reconcilable with an exclusively eschatological character of the
+preaching of the Kingdom, the moment this is at all minimised it becomes
+unintelligible, not to mention the fact that in this case nothing can be
+made of the saying about the immediate coming of the Son of Man in Matt.
+x. 23. As though he felt the stern eye of old Reimarus upon him, Bousset
+hastens in a footnote to throw overboard the whole report of the mission
+of the Twelve as an "obscure and unintelligible tradition." Not content
+with that, he adds: "Perhaps the whole narrative is merely an expansion of
+some direction about missionising given by Jesus to the disciples in view
+of a later time." Before, it was only the discourse which was
+unhistorical; now it is the whole account of the mission--at least if we
+may assume that here, as is usual with theologians of all times, the
+author's real opinion is expressed in the footnote, and his most cherished
+opinion of all introduced with "perhaps." But how much historical material
+will remain to modern theologians in the Gospels if they are forced to
+abandon it wholesale from their objection to pure eschatology? If all the
+pronouncements of this kind to which the representatives of the Marcan
+hypothesis have committed themselves were collected together, they would
+make a book which would be much more damaging even than that book of
+Wrede's which dropped a bomb into their midst.
+
+A third problem is offered by the saying in Matt. xi. 12, about "the
+violent" who, since the time of John the Baptist, "take the Kingdom of
+Heaven by force," which raises fresh difficulties for the exegetical art.
+It is true that if art sufficed, we should not have long to wait for the
+solution in this case. We should be asked to content ourselves with one or
+other of the artificial solutions with which exegetes have been accustomed
+from of old to find a way round this difficulty. Usually the saying is
+claimed as supporting the "presence" of the Kingdom. This is the line
+taken by Wendt, Wernle, and Arnold Meyer.(179) According to the last named
+it means: "From the days of John the Baptist it has been possible to get
+possession of the Kingdom of God; yea, the righteous are every day earning
+it for their own." But no explanation has heretofore succeeded in making
+it in any degree intelligible how Jesus could date the presence of the
+Kingdom from the Baptist, whom in the same breath He places outside of the
+Kingdom, or why, in order to express so simple an idea, He uses such
+entirely unnatural and inappropriate expressions as "rape" and "wrest to
+themselves."
+
+The full difficulties of the passage are first exhibited by Johannes
+Weiss.(180) He restores it to its natural sense, according to which it
+means that since that time the Kingdom suffers, or is subjected to,
+violence, and in order to be able to understand it literally he has to
+take it in a condemnatory sense. Following Alexander Schweizer,(181) he
+sums up his interpretation in the following sentence: Jesus describes, and
+in the form of the description shows His condemnation of, a violent
+Zealotistic Messianic movement which has been in progress since the days
+of the Baptist.(182) But this explanation again makes Jesus express a very
+simple meaning in a very obscure phrase. And what indication is there that
+the sense is condemnatory? Where do we hear anything more about a Zealotic
+Messianic movement, of which the Baptist formed the starting-point? His
+preaching certainly offered no incentive to such a movement, and Jesus'
+attitude towards the Baptist is elsewhere, even in Jerusalem, entirely one
+of approval. Moreover, a condemnatory saying of this kind would not have
+been closed with the distinctive formula: "He that hath ears to hear let
+him hear" (Matt. xi. 15), which elsewhere, cf. Mark iv. 9, indicates a
+mystery.
+
+We must, therefore, accept the conclusion that we really do not understand
+the saying, that we "have not ears to hear it," that we do not know
+sufficiently well the essential character of the Kingdom of God, to
+understand why Jesus describes the coming of the Kingdom as a doing-
+violence-to-it, which has been in progress since the days of the Baptist,
+especially as the hearers themselves do not seem to have cared, or been
+able, to understand what was the connexion of the coming with the
+violence; nor do we know why He expects them to understand how the Baptist
+is identical with Elias.
+
+But the problem which became most prominent of all the new problems raised
+by eschatology, was the question concerning the Son of Man. It had become
+a dogma of theology that Jesus used the term Son of Man to veil His
+Messiahship; that is to say, every theologian found in this term whatever
+meaning he attached to the Messiahship of Jesus, the human, humble,
+ethical, unpolitical, unapocalyptic, or whatever other character was held
+to be appropriate to the orthodox "transformed" Messiahship. The Danielic
+Son of Man entered into the conception only so far as it could do so
+without endangering the other characteristics. Confronted with the
+Similitudes of Enoch, theologians fell back upon the expedient of assuming
+them to be spurious, or at least worked-over in a Christian sense in the
+Son of Man passages, just as the older history of dogma got rid of the
+Ignatian letters, of which it could make nothing, by denying their
+genuineness. But once the Jewish eschatology was seriously applied to the
+explanation of the Son of Man conception, all was changed. A new dilemma
+presented itself; either Jesus used the expression, and used it in a
+purely Jewish apocalyptic sense, or He did not use it at all.
+
+Although Baldensperger did not state the dilemma in its full trenchancy,
+Hilgenfeld thought it necessary to defend Jesus against the suspicion of
+having borrowed His system of thought and His self-designation from Jewish
+Apocalypses.(183) Orello Cone, too, will not admit that the expression Son
+of Man has only apocalyptic suggestion in the mouth of Jesus, but will
+have it interpreted according to Mark ii. 10 and 28, where His pure
+humanity is the idea which is emphasised.(184) Oort holds, more logically,
+that Jesus did not use it, but that the disciples took the expression from
+"the Gospel" and put it into the mouth of Jesus.(185)
+
+Johannes Weiss formulated the problem clearly, and proposed that, with the
+exception of the two passages where Son of Man means man in general, only
+those should be recognised in which the significance attached to the term
+in Daniel and the Apocalypses is demanded by the context. By so doing he
+set theology a problem calculated to keep it occupied for many years. Not
+many indeed at first recognised the problem. Charles, however, meets it in
+a bold fashion, proposing to regard the Son of Man, in Jesus' usage of the
+title, as a conception in which the Messiah of the Book of Enoch and the
+Servant of the Lord in Isaiah are united into one.(186) Most writers,
+however, did not free themselves from inconsistencies. They wanted at one
+and the same time to make the apocalyptic element dominant in the
+expression, and to hold that Jesus could not have taken the conception
+over unaltered, but must have transformed it in some way. These
+inconsistencies necessarily result from the assumption of Weiss's
+opponents that Jesus intended to designate Himself as Messiah in the
+actual present. For since the expression Son of Man has in itself only an
+apocalyptic sense referring to the future, they had to invent another
+sense applicable to the present, which Jesus might have inserted into it.
+In all these learned discussions of the title Son of Man this operation is
+assumed to have been performed.
+
+According to Bousset, Jesus created, and embodied in this term, a new form
+of the Messianic ideal which united the super-earthly with the human and
+lowly. In any case, he thinks, the term has a meaning applicable in this
+present world. Jesus uses it at once to conceal and to suggest His
+Messianic dignity. How conscious Bousset, nevertheless, is of the
+difficulty is evident from the fact that in discussing the meaning of the
+title he remarks that the Messianic significance must have been of
+subordinate importance in the estimation of Jesus, and cannot have formed
+the basis of His actions, otherwise He would have laid more stress upon it
+in His preaching. As if the term Son of Man had not meant for His
+contemporaries all He needed to say!
+
+Bousset's essay on Jewish Apocalyptic,(187) published in 1903, seeks the
+solution in a rather different direction, by postponing, namely, to the
+very last possible moment the adoption of this self-designation. "In all
+probability Jesus in a few isolated sayings towards the close of His life
+hit upon this title Son of Man as a means of expressing, in the face of
+the thought of defeat and death, which forced itself upon Him, His
+confidence in the abiding victory of His person and His cause." If this is
+so, the emphasis must be principally on the triumphant apocalyptic aspects
+of the title.
+
+Even this belated adoption of the title Son of Man is more than Brandt is
+willing to admit, and he holds it to be improbable that Jesus used the
+expression at all. It would be more natural, he thinks, to suppose that
+the Evangelist Mark introduced this self-designation, as he introduced so
+much else, into the Gospel on the ground of the figurative apocalyptic
+discourses in the Gospel.
+
+Just when ingenuity appeared to have exhausted itself in attempts to solve
+the most difficult of the problems raised by the eschatological school,
+the historical discussion suddenly seemed about to be rendered objectless.
+Philology entered a _caveat_. In 1896 appeared Lietzmann's essay upon "The
+Son of Man," which consisted of an investigation of the linguistic basis
+of the enigmatic self-designation.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII. QUESTIONS REGARDING THE ARAMAIC LANGUAGE, RABBINIC PARALLELS, AND
+BUDDHISTIC INFLUENCE
+
+
+    _Arnold Meyer._ Jesu Muttersprache. (The Mother Tongue of Jesus.)
+    Leipzig, 1896. 166 pp.
+
+    _Hans Lietzmann._ Der Menschensohn. Ein Beitrag zur
+    neutestamentlichen Theologie. (The Son of Man. A Contribution to
+    New Testament Theology.) Freiburg, 1896. 95 pp.
+
+    _J. Wellhausen._ Israelitische und juedische Geschichte. (History
+    of Israel and the Jews.) 3rd ed., 1897; 4th ed., 1901. 394 pp.
+
+    _Gustaf Dalman._ Grammatik des juedisch-palaestinensischen
+    Aramaeisch. (Grammar of Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic.) Leipzig, 1894.
+    Die Worte Jesu. Mit Beruecksichtigung des nachkanonischen juedischen
+    Schrifttums und der aramaeischen Sprache. (The Sayings of Jesus
+    considered in connexion with the post-canonical Jewish writings
+    and the Aramaic Language.) I. Introduction and certain leading
+    conceptions: with an appendix on Messianic texts. Leipzig, 1898.
+    309 pp.
+
+    _A. Wuensche._ Neue Beitraege zur Erlaeuterung der Evangelien aus
+    Talmud und Midrasch. (New Contributions to the Explanation of the
+    Gospels, from Talmud and Midrash.) Goettingen, 1878. 566 pp.
+
+    _Ferdinand Weber._ System der altsynagogalen palaestinensischen
+    Theologie. (System of Theology of the Ancient Palestinian
+    Synagogue.) Leipzig, 1880. 399 pp. 2nd ed., 1897.
+
+    _Rudolf Seydel._ Das Evangelium Jesu in seinen Verhaeltnissen zur
+    Buddha-Sage und Buddha-Lehre. (The Gospel of Jesus in its
+    relations to the Buddha-Legend and the Teaching of Buddha.)
+    Leipzig, 1882. 337 pp. Die Buddha-Legende und das Leben Jesu nach
+    den Evangelien. Erneute Pruefung ihres gegenseitigen Verhaeltnisses.
+    (The Buddha-Legend and the Life of Jesus in the Gospels. A New
+    Examination of their Mutual Relations.) 2nd ed., 1897. 129 pp.
+
+
+Only since the appearance of Dalman's Grammar of Jewish Palestinian
+Aramaic in 1894 have we really known what was the dialect in which the
+Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount were spoken. This work closes a
+discussion which had been proceeding for centuries on a line parallel to
+that of theology proper, and which, according to the clear description of
+Arnold Meyer, ran its course somewhat as follows.(188)
+
+The question regarding the language spoken by Jesus had been vigorously
+discussed in the sixteenth century. Up till that time no one had known
+what to make of the tradition recorded by Eusebius that the speech of the
+apostles had been "Syrian" since the distinction between Syrian, Hebrew,
+and "Chaldee" was not understood and all three designations were used
+indiscriminately. Light was first thrown upon the question by Joseph
+Justus Scaliger ({~DAGGER~} 1609). In the year 1555, Joh. Alb. Widmanstadt,
+Chancellor of Ferdinand I., had published the Syriac translation of the
+Bible in fulfilment of the wishes of an old scholar of Bologna, Theseus
+Ambrosius, who had left him the manuscript as a sacred legacy. He himself
+and his contemporaries believed that in this they had the Gospel in the
+mother-tongue of Jesus, until Scaliger, in one of his letters, gave a
+clear sketch of the Syrian dialects, distinguished Syriac from Chaldee,
+and further drew a distinction between the Babylonian Chaldee and Jewish
+Chaldee of the Targums, and in the language of the Targums itself
+distinguished an earlier from a later stratum. The apostles spoke,
+according to Scaliger, a Galilaean dialect of Chaldaic, or according to
+the more correct nomenclature introduced later, following a suggestion of
+Scaliger's, a dialect of Aramaic, and, in addition to that, the Syriac of
+Antioch. Next, Hugo Grotius put in a strong plea for a distinction between
+Jewish and Antiochian Syriac. Into the confusion caused at that time by
+the use of the term "Hebrew" some order was introduced by the Leyden
+Calvinistic professor Claude Saumaise, who, writing in French, emphasised
+the point that the New Testament, and the Early Fathers, when they speak
+of Hebrew, mean Syriac, since Hebrew had become completely unknown to the
+Jews of that period. Brian Walton, the editor of the London polyglot,
+which was completed in 1657, supposed that the dialect of Onkelos and
+Jonathan was the language of Jesus, being under the impression that both
+these Targums were written in the time of Jesus.
+
+The growing knowledge of the distinction between Hebrew and Aramaic did
+not prevent the Vienna Jesuit Inchofer ({~DAGGER~} 1648) from maintaining that
+Jesus spoke--Latin! The Lord cannot have used any other language upon
+earth, since this is the language of the saints in heaven. On the
+Protestant side, Vossius, opposing Richard Simon, endeavoured to establish
+the thesis that Greek was the language of Jesus, being partly inspired by
+the apologetic purpose of preventing the authenticity of the discourses
+and sayings of Jesus from being weakened by supposing them to have been
+translated from Aramaic into Greek, but also rightly recognising the
+importance which the Greek language must have assumed at that time in
+northern Palestine, through which there passed such important trade
+routes.
+
+This view was brought up again by the Neapolitan legal scholar, Dominicus
+Diodati, in his book _De Christo Graece loquente_, 1767, who added some
+interesting material concerning the importance of the Greek language at
+the period and in the native district of Jesus. But five years later, in
+1772, this view was thoroughly refuted by Giambernardo de Rossi,(189) who
+argued convincingly that among a people so separate and so conservative as
+the Jews the native language cannot possibly have been wholly driven out.
+The apostles wrote Greek for the sake of foreign readers. In the year
+1792, Johann Adrian Bolten, "first collegiate pastor at the principal
+church in Altona" ({~DAGGER~} 1807), made the first attempt to re-translate the
+sayings of Jesus into the original tongue.(190)
+
+The certainly original Greek of the Epistles and the Johannine literature
+was a strong argument against the attempt to recognise no language save
+Aramaic as known to Jesus and His disciples. Paulus the rationalist,
+therefore, sought a middle path, and explained that while the Aramaic
+dialect was indeed the native language of Jesus, Greek had become so
+generally current among the population of Galilee, and still more of
+Jerusalem, that the founders of Christianity could use this language when
+they found it needful to do so. His Catholic contemporary, Hug, came to a
+similar conclusion.
+
+In the course of the nineteenth century Aramaic--known down to the time of
+Michaelis as "Chaldee"(191)--was more thoroughly studied. The various
+branches of this language and the history of its progress became more or
+less clearly recognisable. Kautzsch's grammar of Biblical Aramaic(192)
+(1884) and Dalman's(193) work embody the result of these studies. "The
+Aramaic language," explains Meyer, "is a branch of the North Semitic, the
+linguistic stock to which also belong the Assyrio-Babylonian language in
+the East, and the Canaanitish languages, including Hebrew, in the West,
+while the South Semitic languages--the Arabic and Aethiopic--form a group by
+themselves." The users of these languages, the Aramaeans, were seated in
+historic times between the Babylonians and Canaanites, the area of their
+distribution extending from the foot of Lebanon and Hermon in a north-
+easterly direction as far as Mesopotamia, where "Aram of the two rivers"
+forms their easternmost province. Their immigration into these regions
+forms the third epoch of the Semitic migrations, which probably lasted
+from 1600 B.C. down to 600.
+
+The Aramaic states had no great stability. The most important of them was
+the kingdom of Damascus, which at a certain period was so dangerous an
+enemy to northern Israel. In the end, however, the Aramaean dynasties were
+crushed, like the two Israelitish kingdoms, between the upper and nether
+millstones of Babylon and Egypt. In the time of the successors of
+Alexander, there arose in these regions the Syrian kingdom; which in turn
+gave place to the Roman power.
+
+But linguistically the Aramaeans conquered the whole of Western Asia. In
+the course of the first millennium B.C. Aramaic became the language of
+commerce and diplomacy, as Babylonian had been during the second. It was
+only the rise of Greek as a universal language which put a term to these
+conquests of the Aramaic.
+
+In the year 701 B.C. Aramaic had not yet penetrated to Judaea. When the
+_rabshakeh_ (officer) sent by Sennacherib addressed the envoys of Hezekiah
+in Hebrew, they begged him to speak Aramaic in order that the men upon the
+wall might not understand.(194) For the post-exilic period the Aramaic
+edicts in the Book of Ezra and inscriptions on Persian coins show that
+throughout wide districts of the new empire Aramaic had made good its
+position as the language of common intercourse. Its domain extended from
+the Euxine southwards as far as Egypt, and even into Egypt itself. Samaria
+and the Hauran adopted it. Only the Greek towns and Phoenicia resisted.
+
+The influence of Aramaic upon Jewish literature begins to be noticeable
+about the year 600. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, writing in a foreign land in an
+Aramaic environment, are the first witnesses to its supremacy. In the
+northern part of the country, owing to the immigration of foreign
+colonists after the destruction of the northern kingdom, it had already
+gained a hold upon the common people. In the Book of Daniel, written in
+the year 167 B.C., the Hebrew and Aramaic languages alternate. Perhaps,
+indeed, we ought to assume an Aramaic ground-document as the basis of this
+work.
+
+At what time Aramaic became the common popular speech in the post-exilic
+community we cannot exactly discover. Under Nehemiah "Judaean," that is to
+say, Hebrew, was still spoken in Jerusalem; in the time of the Maccabees
+Aramaic seems to have wholly driven out the ancient national language.
+Evidence for this is to be found in the occurrence of Aramaic passages in
+the Talmud, from which it is evident that the Rabbis used this language in
+the religious instruction of the people. The provision that the text,
+after being read in Hebrew, should be interpreted to the people, may quite
+well reach back into the time of Jesus. The first evidence for the
+practice is in the Mishna, about A.D. 150.
+
+In the time of Jesus three languages met in Galilee--Hebrew, Aramaic, and
+Greek. In what relation they stood to each other we do not know, since
+Josephus, the only writer who could have told us, fails us in this point,
+as he so often does elsewhere. He informs us that when acting as an envoy
+of Titus he spoke to the people of Jerusalem in the ancestral language,
+and the word he uses is {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ZETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}. But the very thing we should like to
+know--whether, namely, this language was Aramaic or Hebrew, he does not
+tell us. We are left in the same uncertainty by the passage in Acts (xxii.
+2) which says that Paul spoke to the people {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH YPOGEGRAMMENI~}, thereby
+gaining their attention, for there is no indication whether the language
+was Aramaic or Hebrew. For the writers of that period "Hebrew" simply
+means Jewish.
+
+We cannot, therefore, be sure in what relation the ancient Hebrew sacred
+language and the Aramaic of ordinary intercourse stood to one another as
+regards religious writings and religious instruction. Did the ordinary man
+merely learn by heart a few verses, prayers, and psalms? Or was Hebrew, as
+the language of the cultus, also current in wider circles?
+
+Dalman gives a number of examples of works written in Hebrew in the
+century which witnessed the birth of Christ: "A Hebrew original," he says,
+"must be assumed in the case of the main part of the Aethiopic book of
+Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Baruch, Fourth Ezra, the
+Book of Jubilees, and for the Jewish ground-document of the Testament of
+the Twelve Patriarchs, of which M. Gaster has discovered a Hebrew
+manuscript." The first Book of Maccabees, too, seems to him to go back to
+a Hebrew original. Nevertheless, he holds it to be impossible that
+synagogue discourses intended for the people can have been delivered in
+Hebrew, or that Jesus taught otherwise than in Aramaic.
+
+Franz Delitzsch's view, on the other hand, is that Jesus and the disciples
+taught in Hebrew; and that is the opinion of Resch also. Adolf
+Neubauer,(195) Reader in Rabbinical Hebrew at Oxford, attempted a
+compromise. It was certainly the case, he thought, that in the time of
+Jesus Aramaic was spoken throughout Palestine; but whereas in Galilee this
+language had an exclusive dominance, and the knowledge of Hebrew was
+confined to texts learned by heart, in Jerusalem Hebrew had renewed itself
+by the adoption of Aramaic elements, and a kind of Neo-Hebraic language
+had arisen. This solution at least testifies to the difficulty of the
+question. The fact is that from the language of the New Testament it is
+often difficult to make out whether the underlying words are Hebrew or
+Aramaic. Thus, for instance, Dalman remarks--with reference to the question
+whether the statement of Papias refers to a Hebrew or an Aramaic
+"primitive Matthew"--that it is difficult "to produce proof of an Aramaic
+as distinct from a Hebrew source, because it is often the case in Biblical
+Hebrew, and still more often in the idiom of the Mishna, that the same
+expressions and forms of phrase are possible as in Aramaic."
+Delitzsch's(196) "retranslation" of the New Testament into Hebrew is
+therefore historically justified.
+
+But the question about the language of Jesus must not be confused with the
+problem of the original language of the primitive form of Matthew's
+Gospel. In reference to the latter, Dalman thinks that the tradition of
+the Early Church regarding an earlier Aramaic form of the Gospel must be
+considered as lacking confirmation. "It is only in the case of Jesus' own
+words that an Aramaic original form is undeniable, and it is only for
+these that Early Church tradition asserted the existence of a Semitic
+documentary source. It is, therefore, the right and duty of Biblical
+scholarship to investigate the form which the sayings of Jesus must have
+taken in the original and the sense which in this form they must have
+conveyed to Jewish hearers."
+
+That Jesus spoke Aramaic, Meyer has shown by collecting all the Aramaic
+expressions which occur in His preaching.(197) He considers the "Abba" in
+Gethsemane decisive, for this means that Jesus prayed in Aramaic in His
+hour of bitterest need. Again the cry from the cross was, according to
+Mark xv. 34, also Aramaic: {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND OXIA~}, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND OXIA~}, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH VARIA~}. The Old Testament
+was therefore most familiar to Him in an Aramaic translation, otherwise
+this form of the Psalm passage would not have come to His lips at the
+moment of death.
+
+It is a quite independent question whether Jesus could speak, or at least
+understand, Greek. According to Josephus the knowledge of Greek in
+Palestine at that time, even among educated Jews, can only have been of a
+quite elementary character. He himself had to learn it laboriously in
+order to be able to write in it. His "Jewish War" was first written in
+Aramaic for his fellow-countrymen; the Greek edition was, by his own
+avowal, not intended for them. In another passage, it is true, he seems to
+imply a knowledge of, and interest in, foreign languages even among people
+in humble life.(198)
+
+An analogy, which is in many respects very close, to the linguistic
+conditions in Palestine was offered by Alsace under French rule in the
+'sixties of the nineteenth century. Here, too, three languages met in the
+same district. The High-German of Luther's translation of the Bible was
+the language of the Church, the Alemannic dialect was the usual speech of
+the people, while French was the language of culture and of government
+administration. This remarkable analogy would be rather in favour--if
+analogy can be admitted to have any weight in the question--of Delitzsch
+and Resch, since the Biblical High-German, although never spoken in social
+intercourse, strongly influenced the Alemannic dialect--although this was,
+on the other hand, quite uninfluenced by Modern High-German--but did not
+allow it to penetrate into Church or school, there maintaining for itself
+an undivided sway. French made some progress, but only in certain circles,
+and remained entirely excluded from the religious sphere. The Alsatians of
+the poorer classes who could at that time have repeated the Lord's Prayer
+or the Beatitudes in French would not have been difficult to count. The
+Lutheran translation still holds its own to some extent against the French
+translation with the older generation of the Alsatian community in Paris,
+which has in other respects become completely French--so strong is the
+influence of a former ecclesiastical language even among those who have
+left their native home. There is one factor, however, which is not
+represented in the analogy; the influence of the Greek-speaking Jews of
+the Diaspora, who gathered to the Feasts at Jerusalem, upon the extension
+of the Greek language in the mother-country.
+
+Jesus, then, spoke Galilaean Aramaic, which is known to us as a separate
+dialect from writings of the fourth to the seventh century. For the
+Judaean dialect we have more and earlier evidence. We have literary
+monuments in it from the first to the third century. "It is very
+probable," Dalman thinks, "that the popular dialect of Northern Palestine,
+after the final fall of the Judaean centre of the Aramaic-Jewish culture,
+which followed on the Bar-Cochba rising, spread over almost the whole of
+Palestine."
+
+The retranslations into Aramaic are therefore justified. After J. A.
+Bolten's attempt had remained for nearly a hundred years the only one of
+its kind, the experiment has been renewed in our own time by J. T.
+Marshall, E. Nestle, J. Wellhausen, Arnold Meyer, and Gustaf Dalman; in
+the case of Marshall and Nestle with the subsidiary purpose of
+endeavouring to prove the existence of an Aramaic documentary source.
+These retranslations first attracted their due meed of attention from
+theologians in connexion with the Son-of-Man question. Rarely, if ever,
+have theologians experienced such a surprise as was sprung upon them by
+Hans Lietzmann's essay in 1896.(199) Jesus had never, so ran the thesis of
+the Bonn candidate in theology, applied to Himself the title Son of Man,
+because in the Aramaic the title did not exist, and on linguistic grounds
+could not have existed. In the language which He used, {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~} was merely a
+periphrasis for "a man." That Jesus meant Himself when He spoke of the Son
+of Man, none of His hearers could have suspected.
+
+Lietzmann had not been without predecessors.(200) Gilbert Genebrard, who
+died Archbishop of Aix as long ago as 1597, had emphasised the point that
+the term Son of Man should not be interpreted with reference solely to
+Christ, but to the race of mankind. Hugo Grotius maintained the same
+position even more emphatically. With a quite modern one-sidedness, Paulus
+the rationalist maintained in his commentaries and in his Life of Jesus
+that according to Ezek. ii. 1 "Barnash" meant man in general. Jesus, he
+thought, whenever He used the expression the Son of Man, pointed to
+Himself and thus gave it the sense of "this man." In taking this line he
+gives up the general reference to mankind as a whole for which Mark ii. 28
+is generally cited as the classical passage. The suggestion that the term
+Son of Man in its apocalyptic signification was first attributed to Jesus
+at a later time and that the passages where it occurs in this sense are
+therefore suspicious, was first put forward by Fr. Aug. Fritzsche. He
+hoped in this way to get rid of Matt. x. 23. De Lagarde, like Paulus,
+emphatically asserted that Son of Man only meant man. But instead of the
+clumsy explanation of the rationalist he gave another and a more pleasing
+one, namely, that Jesus by choosing this title designed to ennoble
+mankind. Wellhausen, in his "History of Israel and of the Jews" (1894),
+remarked on it as strange that Jesus should have called Himself "the Man."
+B. D. Eerdmans, taking the apocalyptic significance of the term as his
+starting-point, attempted to carry out consistently the theory of the
+later interpolation of this title into the sayings of Jesus.(201)
+
+Thus Lietzmann had predecessors; but they were not so in any real sense.
+They had either started out from the Marcan passage where the Son of Man
+is described as the Lord of the Sabbath, and endeavoured arbitrarily to
+interpret all the Son-of-Man passages in the same sense; or they assumed
+without sufficient grounds that the title Son of Man was a later
+interpolation. The new idea consisted in combining the two attempts, and
+declaring the passages about the Son of Man to be linguistically and
+historically impossible, seeing that, on linguistic grounds, "son of man"
+means "man."
+
+Arnold Meyer and Wellhausen expressed themselves in the same sense as
+Lietzmann. The passages where Jesus uses the expression in an unmistakably
+Messianic sense are, according to them, to be put down to the account of
+Early Christian theology. The only passages which in their opinion are
+historically tenable are the two or three in which the expression denotes
+man in general, or is equivalent to the simple "I." These latter were felt
+to be a difficulty by the Church when it came to think in Greek, since
+this way of speaking of oneself was strange to them; consequently the
+expression appeared to them deliberately enigmatic and only capable of
+being interpreted in the sense which it bears in Daniel. The Son-of-Man
+conception, argued Lietzmann, when he again approached the question two
+years later, had arisen in a Hellenistic environment,(202) on the basis of
+Dan. vii. 13; N. Schmidt,(203) too, saw in the apocalyptic Bar-Nasha
+passages which follow the revelation of the Messiahship at Caesarea
+Philippi an interpolation from the later apocalyptic theology. On the
+other hand, P. Schmiedel still wished to make it a Messianic designation,
+and to take it as being historical in this sense even in passages in which
+the term man "gave a possible sense."(204) H. Gunkel thought that it was
+possible to translate Bar-Nasha simply by "man," and nevertheless hold to
+the historicity of the expression as a self-designation of Jesus. Jesus,
+he suggests, had borrowed this enigmatic term, which goes back to Dan.
+vii. 13, from the mystical apocalyptic literature, meaning thereby to
+indicate that He was the Man of God in contrast to the Man of Sin.(205)
+
+Holtzmann felt a kind of relief in handing over to the philologists the
+obstinate problem which since the time of Baldensperger and Weiss had
+caused so much trouble to theologians, and wanted to postpone the
+historical discussion until the Aramaic experts had settled the linguistic
+question. That happened sooner than was expected. In 1898 Dalman declared
+in his epoch-making work (_Die Worte Jesu_) that he could not admit the
+linguistic objections to the use of the expression Son of Man by Jesus.
+"Biblical Aramaic," he says, "does not differ in this respect from Hebrew.
+The simple {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~} and not {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~} is the term for man."... It was only later
+that the Jewish-Galilaean dialect, like the Palestinian-Christian dialect,
+used {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~} for man, though in both idioms the simple {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~} occurs in the
+sense of "some one." "In view of the whole facts of the case," he
+continues, "what has to be said is that Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic of the
+earlier period used {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~} for 'man,' and occasionally to designate a
+plurality of men makes use of the expression {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER YOD~} {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~}{~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}. The singular {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~}
+was not current, and was only used in imitation of the Hebrew text of the
+Bible, where {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER DALET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL MEM~} belongs to the poetic diction, and is, moreover, not
+of very frequent occurrence." "It is," he says elsewhere, "by no means a
+sign of a sound historical method, instead of working patiently at the
+solution of the problem, to hasten like Oort and Lietzmann to the
+conclusion that the absence of the expression in the New Testament
+Epistles is a proof that Jesus did not use it either, but that there was
+somewhere or other a Hellenistic community in the Early Church which had a
+predilection for this name, and often made Jesus speak of Himself in the
+Gospel narrative in the third person, in order to find an opportunity of
+bringing it in."
+
+So the oxen turned back with the ark into the land of the Philistines. It
+was a case of returning to the starting-point and deciding on historical
+grounds in what sense Jesus had used the expression.(206) But the
+possibilities were reduced by the way in which Lietzmann had posed the
+problem, since the interpretations according to which Jesus had used it in
+a veiled ethical Messianic sense, to indicate the ethical and spiritual
+transformation of all the eschatological conceptions, were now manifestly
+incapable of offering any convincing argument against the radical denial
+of the use of the expression. Baldensperger rightly remarked in a review
+of the whole discussion that the question which was ultimately at stake in
+the combat over the title Son of Man was the question whether Jesus was
+the Messiah or no, and that Dalman, by his proof of its linguistic
+possibility, had saved the Messiahship of Jesus.(207)
+
+But what kind of Messiahship? Is it any other kind than the future
+Messiahship of the apocalyptic Son of Man which Johannes Weiss had
+asserted? Did Jesus mean anything different by the Son of Man from that
+which was meant by the apocalyptic writers? To put it otherwise: behind
+the Son-of-Man problem there lies the general question whether Jesus can
+have described Himself as a present Messiah; for the fundamental
+difficulty is that He, a man upon earth, should give Himself out to be the
+Son of Man, and at the same time apparently give to that title a quite
+different sense from that which it previously possessed.
+
+The champion of the linguistic possibility of this self-designation made
+the last serious attempt to render the transformation of the conception
+historically conceivable. He argues that Jesus cannot have used it as a
+mere meaningless expression, a periphrasis for the simple I.(208) On the
+other hand, the term cannot have been understood by the disciples as an
+exalted title, or at least only in the sense that the title indicative of
+exaltation is paradoxically connected with the title indicative of
+humility. "We shall be justified in saying, that, for the Synoptic
+Evangelists, 'Man's Son' was no title of honour for the Messiah, but--as it
+must necessarily appear to a Hellenist--a veiling of His Messiahship under
+a name which emphasises the humanity of its bearer." For them it was not
+the references to the sufferings of "Man's Son" that were paradoxical, but
+the references to His exaltation: that "Man's Son" should be put to death
+is not wonderful; what is wonderful is His "coming again upon the clouds
+of heaven."
+
+If Jesus called Himself the Son of Man, the only conclusion which could be
+drawn by those that heard Him was, "that for some reason or other He
+desired to describe Himself as a Man _par excellence_." There is no reason
+to think of the Heavenly Son of Man of the Similitudes of Enoch and Fourth
+Ezra; that conception could hardly be present to the minds of His
+auditors.
+
+"How was one who was now walking upon earth, to come from heaven? He would
+have needed first to be translated thither. One who had died or been rapt
+away from earth might be brought back to earth again in this way, or a
+being who had never before been upon earth, might be conceived as
+descending thither."
+
+But if, on the one hand, the title Son of Man was not to be understood
+apart from the reference to the passage in Daniel, while on the other
+Jesus so designated Himself as a man actually present upon earth, "what
+was really implied was that He was the man in whom Daniel's vision of 'one
+like unto a Son of Man' was being fulfilled." He could not certainly
+expect from His hearers a complete understanding of the self-designation.
+"We are doubtless justified in saying that in using it, He intentionally
+offered them an enigma which challenged further reflection upon His
+Person."
+
+According to Peter's confession the name was intelligible to the disciples
+as coming from Dan. vii. 13, and obviously indicating Him who was destined
+to the sovereignty of the world. Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man, "not
+as meaning the lowly one, but as a scion of the human race with its human
+weakness, whom nevertheless God will make Lord of the world; and it is
+very probable that Jesus found the Son of Man of Dan. vii. in Ps. viii. 5
+ff. also." Sayings regarding humiliation and suffering could be attached
+to the title just as well as references to exaltation. For since the
+"Child of Man" has placed Himself upon the throne of God, He is in reality
+no longer a mere man, but ruler over heaven and earth, "the Lord."
+
+This attempt of Dalman's has the same significance in regard to the
+question of the Messiahship as Bousset's had for the ethical question.
+Just as in Bousset's view the Kingdom of God was, in a paradoxical way,
+after all proclaimed as present, so here the self-designation "Son of Man"
+is retained by a paradox as conveying the sense of a present Messiahship.
+But the documents do not give any support to this assumption; on the
+contrary they contradict it at every point. According to Dalman it was not
+the predictions of the passion of the Son of Man which sounded paradoxical
+to the disciples, but the predictions of His exaltation. But we are
+distinctly told that when He spoke of His passion they did not understand
+the saying. The predictions of His exaltation, however, they understood so
+well that without troubling themselves further about the predictions of
+the sufferings, they began to dispute who should be greatest in the
+Kingdom of Heaven, and who should have his throne closest to the Son of
+Man. And if it is once admitted that Jesus took the designation from
+Daniel, what ground is there for asserting that the purely eschatological
+transcendental significance which the term had taken on in the Similitudes
+of Enoch and retains in Fourth Ezra had no existence for Jesus? Thus, by a
+long round-about, criticism has come back to Johannes Weiss.(209) His
+eschatological solution of the Son-of-Man question--the elements of which
+are to be found in Strauss's first Life of Jesus--is the only possible one.
+Dalman expresses the same idea in the form of a question. "How could one
+who was actually walking the earth come down from heaven? He would have
+needed first to be translated thither. One who had died or been rapt away
+from earth might possibly be brought back to earth in this way." Having
+reached this point we have only to observe further that Jesus, from the
+"confession of Peter" onwards, always speaks of the Son of Man in
+connexion with death and resurrection. That is to say, that once the
+disciples know in what relation He stands to the Son of Man, He uses this
+title to suggest the manner of His return: as the sequel to His death and
+resurrection He will return to the world again as a superhuman
+Personality. Thus the purely transcendental use of the term suggested by
+Dalman as a possibility turns out to be the historical reality.
+
+Broadly speaking, therefore, the Son-of-Man problem is both historically
+solvable and has been solved. The authentic passages are those in which
+the expression is used in that apocalyptic sense which goes back to
+Daniel. But we have to distinguish two different uses of the term
+according to the degree of knowledge assumed in the hearers. If the secret
+of Jesus is unknown to them, then in that case they understand simply that
+Jesus is speaking of the "Son of Man" and His coming without having any
+suspicion that He and the Son of Man have any connexion. It would be thus,
+for instance, when in sending out the disciples in Matt. x. 23, He
+announced the imminence of the appearing of the Son of Man; or when He
+pictured the judgment which the Son of Man would hold (Matt. xxv. 31-46),
+if we may imagine it to have been spoken to the people at Jerusalem. Or,
+on the other hand, the secret is known to the hearers. In that case they
+understand that the term Son of Man points to the position to which He
+Himself is to be exalted when the present era passes into the age to come.
+It was thus, no doubt, in the case of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi,
+and of the High Priest to whom Jesus, after answering his demand with the
+simple "Yea" (Mark xiv. 62), goes on immediately to speak of the
+exaltation of the Son of Man to the right hand of God, and of His coming
+upon the clouds of heaven.
+
+Jesus did not, therefore, veil His Messiahship by using the expression Son
+of Man, much less did He transform it, but He used the expression to
+refer, in the only possible way, to His Messianic office as destined to be
+realised at His "coming," and did so in such a manner that only the
+initiated understood that He was speaking of His own coming, while others
+understood Him as referring to the coming of a Son of Man who was other
+than Himself.
+
+The passages where the title has not this apocalyptic reference, or where,
+previous to the incident at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus in speaking to the
+disciples equates the Son of Man with His own "ego," are to be explained
+as of literary origin. This set of secondary occurrences of the title has
+nothing to do with "Early Church theology"; it is merely a question of
+phenomena of translation and tradition. In the saying about the Sabbath in
+Mark ii. 28, and perhaps also in the saying about the right to forgive
+sins in Mark ii. 10, Son of Man doubtless stood in the original in the
+general sense of "man," but was later, certainly by our Evangelists,
+understood as referring to Jesus as the Son of Man. In other passages
+tradition, following the analogy of those passages in which the title is
+authentic, put in place of the simple I--expressed in the Aramaic by "the
+man"--the self-designation "Son of Man," as we can clearly show by
+comparing Matt. xvi. 13, "Who do men say that the Son of Man is?" with
+Mark viii. 27, "Who do men say that I am?"
+
+Three passages call for special discussion. In the statement that a man
+may be forgiven for blasphemy against the Son of Man, but not for
+blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in Matt. xii. 32, the "Son of Man" may
+be authentic. But of course it would not, even in that case, give any hint
+that "Son of Man designates the Messiah in His humiliation" as Dalman
+wished to infer from the passage, but would mean that Jesus was speaking
+of the Son of Man, here as elsewhere, in the third person without
+reference to Himself, and was thinking of a contemptuous denial of the
+Parousia such as might have been uttered by a Sadducee. But if we take
+into account the parallel in Mark iii. 28 and 29, where blasphemy against
+the Holy Ghost is spoken of without any mention of blasphemy against the
+Son of Man, it seems more natural to take the mention of the Son of Man as
+a secondary interpolation, derived from the same line of tradition,
+perhaps from the same hand, as the "Son of Man" in the question to the
+disciples at Caesarea Philippi.
+
+The two other sayings, the one about the Son of Man "who hath not where to
+lay His head," Matt. viii. 20, and that about the Son of Man who must
+submit to the reproach of being a glutton and a wine-bibber, Matt. xi. 19,
+belong together. If we assume it to be possible, in conformity with the
+saying about the purpose of the parables in Mark iv. 11 and 12, that Jesus
+sometimes spoke words which He did not intend to be understood, we may--if
+we are unwilling to accept the supposition of a later periphrasis for the
+ego, which would certainly be the most natural explanation--recognise in
+these sayings two obscure declarations regarding the Son of Man. They
+would then be supposed to have meant in the original form, which is no
+longer clearly recognisable, that the Son of Man would in some way justify
+the conduct of Jesus of Nazareth. But the way in which this idea is
+expressed was not such as to make it easy for His hearers to identify Him
+with the Son of Man. Moreover, it was for them a conception impossible to
+realise, since Jesus was a natural, and the Son of Man a supernatural,
+being; and the eschatological scheme of things had not provided for a man
+who at the end of the existing era should hint to others that at the great
+transformation of all things He would be manifested as the Son of Man.
+This case presented itself only in the course of history, and it created a
+preparatory stage of eschatology which does not answer to any traditional
+scheme.
+
+That act of the self-consciousness of Jesus by which He recognised Himself
+in His earthly existence as the future Messiah is the act in which
+eschatology supremely affirms itself. At the same time, since it brings,
+spiritually, that which is to come, into the unaltered present, into the
+existing era, it is the end of eschatology. For it is its
+"spiritualisation," a spiritualisation of which the ultimate consequence
+was to be that all its "supersensuous" elements were to be realised only
+spiritually in the present earthly conditions, and all that is affirmed as
+supersensuous in the transcendental sense was to be regarded as only the
+ruined remains of an eschatological world-view. The Messianic secret of
+Jesus is the basis of Christianity, since it involves the de-nationalising
+and the spiritualisation of Jewish eschatology.
+
+Yet more. It is the primal fact, the starting-point, of a process which
+manifests itself, indeed, in Christianity, but cannot fully work itself
+out even here, of a movement in the direction of inwardness which brings
+all religious magnitudes into the one indivisible spiritual present, and
+which Christian dogmatic has not ventured to carry to its completion. The
+Messianic consciousness of the uniquely great Man of Nazareth sets up a
+struggle between the present and the beyond, and introduces that resolute
+absorption of the beyond by the present, which in looking back we
+recognise as the history of Christianity, and of which we are conscious in
+ourselves as the essence of religious progress and experience--a process of
+which the end is not yet in sight.
+
+In this sense Jesus did "accept the world" and did stand in conflict with
+Judaism. Protestantism was a step--a step on which hung weighty
+consequences--in the progress of that "acceptance of the world" which was
+constantly developing itself from within. By a mighty revolution which was
+in harmony with the spirit of that great primal act of the consciousness
+of Jesus, though in opposition to some of the most certain of His sayings,
+ethics became world-accepting. But it will be a mightier revolution still
+when the last remaining ruins of the supersensuous other-worldly system of
+thought are swept away in order to clear the site for a new spiritual,
+purely real and present world. All the inconsistent compromises and
+constructions of modern theology are merely an attempt to stave off the
+final expulsion of eschatology from religion, an inevitable but a hopeless
+attempt. That proleptic Messianic consciousness of Jesus, which was in
+reality the only possible actualisation of the Messianic idea, carries
+these consequences with it inexorably and unfailingly. At that last cry
+upon the cross the whole eschatological supersensuous world fell in upon
+itself in ruins, and there remained as a spiritual reality only that
+present spiritual world, bound as it is to sense, which Jesus by His all-
+powerful word had called into being within the world which He contemned.
+That last cry, with its despairing abandonment of the eschatological
+future, is His real acceptance of the world. The "Son of Man" was buried
+in the ruins of the falling eschatological world; there remained alive
+only Jesus "the Man." Thus these two Aramaic synonyms include in
+themselves, as in a symbol of reality, all that was to come.
+
+If theology has found it so hard a task to arrive at an historical
+comprehension of the secret of this self-designation, this is due to the
+fact that the question is not a purely historical one. In this word there
+lies the transformation of a whole system of thought, the inexorable
+consequence of the elimination of eschatology from religion. It was only
+in this future form, not as actual, that Jesus spoke of His Messiahship.
+Modern theology keeps on endeavouring to discover in the title of Son of
+Man, which is bound up with the future, a humanised present Messiahship.
+It does so in the conviction that the recognition of a purely future
+reference in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus would lead in the last
+result to a modification of the historic basis of our faith, which has
+itself become historical, and therefore true and self-justifying. The
+recognition of the claims of eschatology signifies for our dogmatic a
+burning of the boats by which it felt itself able to return at any moment
+from the time of Jesus direct to the present.
+
+One point that is worthy of notice in this connexion is the
+trustworthiness of the tradition. The Evangelists, writing in Greek, and
+the Greek-speaking Early Church, can hardly have retained an understanding
+of the purely eschatological character of that self-designation of Jesus.
+It had become for them merely an indirect method of self-designation. And
+nevertheless the Evangelists, especially Mark, record the sayings of Jesus
+in such a way that the original significance and application of the
+designation in His mouth is still clearly recognisable, and we are able to
+determine with certainty the isolated cases in which this self-designation
+in His discourses is of a secondary origin.
+
+Thus the use of the term Son of Man--which, if we admitted the sweeping
+proposal of Lietzmann and Wellhausen to cancel it everywhere as an
+interpolation of Greek Early Church theology, would throw doubt on the
+whole of the Gospel tradition--becomes a proof of the certainty and
+trustworthiness of that tradition. We may, in fact, say that the
+progressive recognition of the eschatological character of the teaching
+and action of Jesus carries with it a progressive justification of the
+Gospel tradition. A series of passages and discourses which had been
+endangered because from the modern theological point of view which had
+been made the criterion of the tradition they appeared to be without
+meaning, are now secured. The stone which the critics rejected has become
+the corner-stone of the tradition.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+If Aramaic scholarship appears in regard to the Son-of-Man question among
+the opponents of the thorough-going eschatological view, it takes no other
+position in connexion with the retranslations and in the application of
+illustrative parallels from the Rabbinic literature.
+
+In looking at the earlier works in this department, one is struck with the
+smallness of the result in proportion to the labour expended. The names
+that call for mention here are those of John Lightfoot, Christian
+Schoettgen, Joh. Gerh. Meuschen, J. Jak. Wettstein, F. Nork, Franz
+Delitzsch, Carl Siegfried, and A. Wuensche.(210) But even a work like F.
+Weber's _System der altsynagogalen __ palaestinensischen Theologie_,(211)
+which does not confine itself to single sayings and thoughts, but aims at
+exhibiting the Rabbinic system of thought as a whole, throws, in the main,
+but little light on the thoughts of Jesus. The Rabbinic parables supply,
+according to Juelicher, but little of value for the explanation of the
+parables of Jesus.(212) In this method of discourse, Jesus is so pre-
+eminently original, that any other productions of the Jewish parabolic
+literature are like stunted undergrowth beside a great tree; though that
+has not prevented His originality from being challenged in this very
+department, both in earlier times and at the present. As early as 1648,
+Robert Sheringham, of Cambridge,(213) suggested that the parables in Matt.
+xx. 1 ff., xxv. 1 ff., and Luke xvi., were derived from Talmudic sources,
+an opinion against which J. B. Carpzov, the younger, raised a protest; in
+1839, F. Nork asserted, in his work on "Rabbinic Sources and Parallels for
+the New Testament Writings," that the best thoughts in the discourses of
+Jesus are to be attributed to His Jewish teachers; in 1880 the Dutch
+Rabbi, T. Tal, maintained the thesis that the parables of the New
+Testament are all borrowed from the Talmud.(214) Theories of this kind
+cannot be refuted, because they lack the foundation necessary to any
+theory which is to be capable of being rationally discussed--that of plain
+common sense.(215)
+
+We possess, however, really scientific attempts to define more closely the
+thoughts of Jesus by the aid of the Rabbinic language and Rabbinic ideas
+in the works of Arnold Meyer and Dalman. It cannot indeed be said that the
+obscure sayings which form the problem of present-day exegesis are in all
+cases made clearer by them, much as we may admire the comprehensive
+knowledge of these scholars. Sometimes, indeed, they become more obscure
+than before. According to Meyer, for instance, the question of Jesus
+whether His disciples can drink of His cup, and be baptized with His
+baptism means, if put back into Aramaic, "Can you drink as bitter a drink
+as I; can you eat as sharply salted meat as I?"(216) Nor does Dalman's
+Aramaic retranslation help us much with the saying about the violent who
+take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. According to him, it is not spoken of
+the faithful, but of the rulers of this world, and refers to the epoch of
+the Divine rule which has been introduced by the imprisonment of the
+Baptist. No one can violently possess himself of the Divine reign, and
+Jesus can therefore only mean that violence is done to it in the person of
+its subjects.
+
+On this it must be remarked, that if the saying really means this, it is
+about as appropriate to its setting as a rock in the sky. Jesus is not
+speaking of the imprisonment of the Baptist. By the days of John the
+Baptist He means the time of his public ministry.
+
+It is equally open to question whether in putting that crucial question
+regarding the Messiah in Mark xii. 37 He really intended to show, as
+Dalman thinks, "that physical descent from David was not of decisive
+importance--it did not belong to the essence of the Messiahship."
+
+But a point in regard to which Dalman's remarks are of great value for the
+reconstruction of the life of Jesus is the entry into Jerusalem. Dalman
+thinks that the simple "Hosanna, blessed be he that cometh in the name of
+the Lord" (Mark xi. 9) was what the people really shouted in acclamation,
+and that the additional words in Mark and Matthew are simply an
+interpretative expansion. This acclamation did not itself contain any
+Messianic reference. This explains "why the entry into Jerusalem was not
+made a count in the charge urged against Him before Pilate." The events of
+"Palm Sunday" only received their distinctively Messianic colour later. It
+was not the Messiah, but the prophet and wonder-worker of Galilee whom the
+people hailed with rejoicing and accompanied with invocations of
+blessing.(217)
+
+Generally speaking, the value of Dalman's work lies less in the solutions
+which it offers than in the problems which it raises. By its very thorough
+discussions it challenges historical theology to test its most cherished
+assumptions regarding the teaching of Jesus, and make sure whether they
+are really so certain and self-evident. Thus, in opposition to Schuerer, he
+denies that the thought of the pre-existence in heaven of all the good
+things belonging to the Kingdom of God was at all generally current in the
+Late-Jewish world of ideas, and thinks that the occasional references(218)
+to a pre-existing Jerusalem, which shall finally be brought down to the
+earth, do not suffice to establish the theory. Similarly, he thinks it
+doubtful whether Jesus used the terms "this world (age)," "the world (age)
+to come" in the eschatological sense which is generally attached to them,
+and doubts, on linguistic grounds, whether they can have been used at all.
+Even the use of {~HEBREW LETTER AYIN~}{~HEBREW LETTER LAMED~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL MEM~} or {~HEBREW LETTER AYIN~}{~HEBREW LETTER VAV~}{~HEBREW LETTER LAMED~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL MEM~} for "world" cannot be proved. In the pre-
+Christian period there is much reason to doubt its occurrence, though in
+later Jewish literature it is frequent. The expression {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH PERISPOMENI AND YPOGEGRAMMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH YPOGEGRAMMENI~}
+in Matt. xix. 28, is specifically Greek and cannot be reproduced in either
+Hebrew or Aramaic. It is very strange that the use which Jesus makes of
+_Amen_ is unknown in the whole of Jewish literature. According to the
+proper idiom of the language "{~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}{~HEBREW LETTER MEM~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} is never used to emphasise one's own
+speech, but always with reference to the speech, prayer, benediction,
+oath, or curse of another." Jesus, therefore, if He used the expression in
+this sense, must have given it a new meaning as a formula of asseveration,
+in place of the oath which He forbade.
+
+All these acute observations are marked by the general tendency which was
+observable in the interpretation of the term Son of Man, that is, by the
+endeavour so to weaken down the eschatological conceptions of the Kingdom
+and the Messiah, that the hypothesis of a making-present and
+spiritualising of these conceptions in the teaching of Jesus might appear
+inherently and linguistically possible and natural. The polemic against
+the pre-existent realities of the Kingdom of God is intended to show that
+for Jesus the Reign of God is a present benefit, which can be sought
+after, given, possessed, and taken. Even before the time of Jesus,
+according to Dalman, a tendency had shown itself to lay less emphasis, in
+connexion with the hope of the future, upon the national Jewish element.
+Jesus forced this element still farther into the background, and gave a
+more decided prominence to the purely religious element. "For Him the
+reign of God was the Divine power, which from this time onward was
+steadily to carry forward the renewal of the world, and also the renewed
+world, into which men shall one day enter, which even now offers itself,
+and therefore can be grasped and received as a present good." The
+supernatural coming of the Kingdom is only the final stage of the coming
+which is now being inwardly spiritually brought about by the preaching of
+Jesus. Though He may perhaps have spoken of "this" world and the "world to
+come," these expressions had in His use of them no very special
+importance. It is for Him less a question of an antithesis between "then"
+and "now," than of establishing a connexion between them by which the
+transition from one to the other is to be effected.
+
+It is the same in regard to Jesus' consciousness of His Messiahship. "In
+Jesus' view," says Dalman, "the period before the commencement of the
+Reign of God was organically connected with the actual period of His
+Reign." He was the Messiah because He knew Himself to stand in a unique
+ethico-religious relation to God. His Messiahship was not something wholly
+incomprehensible to those about Him. If redemption was regarded as being
+close at hand, the Messiah must be assumed to be in some sense already
+present. Therefore Jesus is both directly and indirectly spoken of as
+Messiah.
+
+Thus the most important work in the department of Aramaic scholarship
+shows clearly the anti-eschatological tendency which characterised it from
+the beginning. The work of Lietzmann, Meyer, Wellhausen, and Dalman, forms
+a distinct episode in the general resistance to eschatology. That Aramaic
+scholarship should have taken up a hostile attitude towards the
+eschatological system of thought of Jesus lies in the nature of things.
+The thoughts which it takes as its standard of comparison were only
+reduced to writing long after the period of Jesus, and, moreover, in a
+lifeless and distorted form, at a time when the apocalyptic temper no
+longer existed as the living counterpoise to the legal righteousness, and
+this legal righteousness had allowed only so much of Apocalyptic to
+survive as could be brought into direct connexion with it. In fact, the
+distance between Jesus' world of thought and this form of Judaism is as
+great as that which separates it from modern ideas. Thus in Dalman
+modernising tendencies and Aramaic scholarship were able to combine in
+conducting a criticism of the eschatology in the teaching of Jesus in
+which the modern man thought the thoughts and the expert in Aramaic
+formulated and supported them, yet without being able in the end to make
+any impression upon the well-rounded whole formed by Jesus' eschatological
+preaching of the Kingdom.
+
+Whether Aramaic scholarship will contribute to the investigation of the
+life and teaching of Jesus along other lines and in a direct and positive
+fashion, only the future can show. But certainly if theologians will give
+heed to the question-marks so acutely placed by Dalman, and recognise it
+as one of their first duties to test carefully whether a thought or a
+connexion of thought is linguistically or inherently Greek, and only
+Greek, in character, they will derive a notable advantage from what has
+already been done in the department of Aramaic study.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+But if the service rendered by Aramaic studies has been hitherto mainly
+indirect, no success whatever has attended, or seems likely to attend, the
+attempt to apply Buddhist ideas to the explanation of the thoughts of
+Jesus. It could only indeed appear to have some prospect of success if we
+could make up our minds to follow the example of the author of one of the
+most recent of fictitious lives of Christ in putting Jesus to school to
+the Buddhist priests; in which case the six years which Monsieur Nicolas
+Notowitsch allots to this purpose, would certainly be none too much for
+the completion of the course.(219) If imagination boggles at this, there
+remains no possibility of showing that Buddhist ideas exercised any direct
+influence upon Jesus. That Buddhism may have had some kind of influence
+upon Late Judaism and thus indirectly upon Jesus is not inherently
+impossible, if we are prepared to recognise Buddhistic influence on the
+Babylonian and Persian civilisations. But it is unproved, unprovable, and
+unthinkable, that Jesus derived the suggestion of the new and creative
+ideas which emerge in His teaching from Buddhism. The most that can be
+done in this direction is to point to certain analogies. For the parables
+of Jesus, Buddhist parallels were suggested by Renan and Havet.(220)
+
+How little these analogies mean in the eyes of a cautious observer is
+evident from the attitude which Max Mueller took up towards the question.
+"That there are startling coincidences between Buddhism and Christianity,"
+he remarks in one passage,(221) "cannot be denied; and it must likewise be
+admitted that Buddhism existed at least four hundred years before
+Christianity. I go even further and say that I should be extremely
+grateful if anybody would point out to me the historical channels through
+which Buddhism had influenced early Christianity. I have been looking for
+such channels all my life, but hitherto I have found none. What I have
+found is that for some of the most startling coincidences there are
+historical antecedents on both sides; and if we once know these
+antecedents the coincidences become far less startling."
+
+A year before Max Mueller formulated his impression in these terms, Rudolf
+Seydel(222) had endeavoured to explain the analogies which had been
+noticed by supposing Christianity to have been influenced by Buddhism. He
+distinguishes three distinct classes of analogies:
+
+1. Those of which the points of resemblance can without difficulty be
+explained as due to the influence of similar sources and motives in the
+two cases.
+
+2. Those which show a so special and unexpected agreement that it appears
+artificial to explain it from the action of similar causes, and the
+dependence of one upon the other commends itself as the most natural
+explanation.
+
+3. Those in which there exists a reason for the occurrence of the idea
+only within the sphere of one of the two religions, or in which at least
+it can very much more easily be conceived as originating within the one
+than within the other, so that the inexplicability of the phenomenon
+within the one domain gives ground for seeking its source within the
+other.
+
+This last class demands a literary explanation of the analogy. Seydel
+therefore postulates, alongside of primitive forms of Matthew and Luke, a
+third source, "a poetic-apocalyptic Gospel of very early date which fitted
+its Christian material into the frame of a Buddhist type of Gospel,
+transforming, purifying, and ennobling the material taken from the foreign
+but related literature by a kind of rebirth inspired by the Christian
+Spirit." Matthew and Luke, especially Luke, follow this poetic Gospel up
+to the point where historic sources become more abundant, and the
+primitive form of Mark begins to dominate their narrative. But even in
+later parts the influence of this poetical source, which as an independent
+document was subsequently lost, continued to make itself felt.
+
+The strongest point of support for this hypothesis, if a mere conjecture
+can be described as such, is found by Seydel in the introductory
+narratives in Luke. Now it is not inherently impossible that Buddhist
+legends, which in one form or another were widely current in the East, may
+have contributed more or less to the formation of the mythical preliminary
+history. Who knows the laws of the formation of legend? Who can follow the
+course of the wind which carries the seed over land and sea? But in
+general it may be said that Seydel actually refutes the hypothesis which
+he is defending. If the material which he brings forward is all that there
+is to suggest a relation between Buddhism and Christianity, we are
+justified in waiting until new discoveries are made in that quarter before
+asserting the necessity of a Buddhist primitive Gospel. That will not
+prevent a succession of theosophic Lives of Jesus from finding their
+account in Seydel's classical work. Seydel indeed delivered himself into
+their hands, because he did not entirely avoid the rash assumption of
+theosophic "historical science" that Jewish eschatology can be equated
+with Buddhistic.
+
+Eduard von Hartmann, in the second edition of his work, "The Christianity
+of the New Testament,"(223) roundly asserts that there can be no question
+of any relation of Jesus to Buddha, nor of any indebtedness either in His
+teaching or in the later moulding of the story of His life, but only of a
+parallel formation of myth.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. THE POSITION OF THE SUBJECT AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+    _Oskar Holtzmann._ Das Leben Jesu. Tuebingen, 1901. 417 pp.
+
+    Das Messianitaetsbewusstsein Jesu und seine neueste Bestreitung.
+    Vortrag. (The Messianic Consciousness of Jesus and the most recent
+    denial of it. A Lecture.) 1902. 26 pp. (Against Wrede.)
+
+    War Jesus Ekstatiker? (Was Jesus an ecstatic?) Tuebingen, 1903. 139
+    pp.
+
+    _Paul Wilhelm Schmidt._ Die Geschichte Jesu. (The History of
+    Jesus.) Freiburg. 1899. 175 pp. (4th impression.)
+
+    Die Geschichte Jesu. Erlaeutert. Mit drei Karten von Prof. K.
+    Furrer (Zuerich). (The History of Jesus. Preliminary Discussions.
+    With three maps by Prof. K. Furrer of Zurich.) Tuebingen, 1904. 414
+    pp.
+
+    _Otto Schmiedel._ Die Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung. (The
+    main Problems in the Study of the Life of Jesus.) Tuebingen, 1902.
+    71 pp. 2nd ed., 1906.
+
+    _Hermann Freiherr von Soden._ Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben
+    Jesu. (The most important Questions about the Life of Jesus.)
+    Vacation Lectures. Berlin, 1904. 111 pp.
+
+    _Gustav Frenssen._ Hilligenlei. Berlin, 1905, pp. 462-593: "Die
+    Handschrift." ("The Manuscript"--in which a Life of Jesus, written
+    by one of the characters of the story, is given in full.)
+
+    _Otto Pfleiderer._ Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehren
+    in geschichtlichem Zusammenhang beschrieben. (Primitive
+    Christianity. Its Documents and Doctrines in their Historical
+    Context.) 2nd ed. Berlin, 1902. Vol. i., 696 pp.
+
+    Die Entstehung des Urchristentums. (How Primitive Christianity
+    arose.) Munich, 1905. 255 pp.
+
+    _Albert Kalthoff._ Das Christus-Problem. Grundlinien zu einer
+    Sozialtheologie. (The Christ-problem. The Ground-plan of a Social
+    Theology.) Leipzig, 1902. 87 pp.
+
+    Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue Beitraege zum Christus-
+    Problem. (How Christianity arose. New contributions to the Christ-
+    problem.) Leipzig, 1904. 155 pp.
+
+    _Eduard von Hartmann._ Das Christentum des Neuen Testaments. (The
+    Christianity of the New Testament.) 2nd revised edition of
+    "Letters on the Christian Religion." Sachsa-in-the-Harz, 1905. 311
+    pp.
+
+    _De Jonge._ Jeschua. Der klassische juedische Mann. Zerstoerung des
+    kirchlichen, Enthuellung des juedischen Jesus-Bildes. Berlin, 1904.
+    112 pp. (Jeshua. The Classical Jewish Man. In which the Jewish
+    picture of Jesus is unveiled, and the ecclesiastical picture
+    destroyed.)
+
+    _Wolfgang Kirchbach._ Was lehrte Jesus? Zwei Urevangelien. (What
+    was the teaching of Jesus? Two Primitive Gospels.) Berlin, 1897.
+    248 pp. 2nd revised and greatly enlarged edition, 1902, 339 pp.
+
+    _Albert Dulk._ Der Irrgang des Lebens Jesu. In geschichtlicher
+    Auffassung dargestellt. (The Error of the Life of Jesus. An
+    Historical View.) 1st part, 1884, 395 pp.; 2nd part, 1885, 302 pp.
+
+    _Paul de Regla._ Jesus von Nazareth. German by A. Just. Leipzig,
+    1894. 435 pp.
+
+    _Ernest Bosc._ La Vie esoterique de Jesus de Nazareth et les
+    origines orientales du christianisme. (The secret Life of Jesus of
+    Nazareth, and the Oriental Origins of Christianity.) Paris, 1902.
+
+
+The ideal Life of Jesus of the close of the nineteenth century is the Life
+which Heinrich Julius Holtzmann did not write--but which can be pieced
+together from his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels and his New Testament
+Theology.(224) It is ideal because, for one thing, it is unwritten, and
+arises only in the idea of the reader by the aid of his own imagination,
+and, for another, because it is traced only in the most general outline.
+What Holtzmann gives us is a sketch of the public ministry, a critical
+examination of details, and a full account of the teaching of Jesus. He
+provides, therefore, the plan and the prepared building material, so that
+any one can carry out the construction in his own way and on his own
+responsibility. The cement and the mortar are not provided by Holtzmann;
+every one must decide for himself how he will combine the teaching and the
+life, and arrange the details within each.
+
+We may recall the fact that Weisse, too, the other founder of the Marcan
+hypothesis, avoided writing a Life of Jesus, because the difficulty of
+fitting the details into the ground-plan appeared to him so great, not to
+say insuperable. It is just this modesty which constitutes his greatness
+and Holtzmann's. Thus the Marcan hypothesis ends, as it had begun, with a
+certain historical scepticism.(225)
+
+The subordinates, it is true, do not allow themselves to be disturbed by
+the change of attitude at head-quarters. They keep busily at work. That is
+their right, and therein consists their significance. By keeping on trying
+to take the positions, and constantly failing, they furnish a practical
+proof that the plan of operations worked out by the general staff is not
+capable of being carried out, and show why it is so, and what kind of new
+tactics will have to be evolved.
+
+The credit of having written a life of Christ which is strictly
+scientific, in its own way very remarkable, and yet foredoomed to failure,
+belongs to Oskar Holtzmann.(226) He has complete confidence in the Marcan
+plan, and makes it his task to fit all the sayings of Jesus into this
+framework, to show "what can belong to each period of the preaching of
+Jesus, and what cannot." His method is to give free play to the magnetic
+power of the most important passages in the Marcan text, making other
+sayings of similar import detach themselves from their present connexion
+and come and group themselves round the main passages.
+
+For example, the controversy with the scribes at Jerusalem regarding the
+charge of doing miracles by the help of Satan (Mark iii. 22-30) belongs,
+according to Holtzmann, as regards content and chronology, to the same
+period as the controversy, in Mark vii., about the ordinances of men which
+results in Jesus being "obliged to take to flight"; the woes pronounced
+upon Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, which now follow on the eulogy
+upon the Baptist (Matt. xi. 21-23), and are accordingly represented as
+having been spoken at the time of the sending forth of the Twelve, are
+drawn by the same kind of magnetic force into the neighbourhood of Mark
+vii., and "express very clearly the attitude of Jesus at the time of His
+withdrawal from the scene of His earlier ministry." The saying in Matt.
+vii. 6 about not giving that which is holy to the dogs or casting pearls
+before swine, does not belong to the Sermon on the Mount, but to the time
+when Jesus, after Caesarea Philippi, forbids the disciples to reveal the
+secret of His Messiahship to the multitude; Jesus' action in cursing the
+fig-tree so that it should henceforth bring no fruit to its owner, who was
+perhaps a poor man, is to be brought into relation with the words spoken
+on the evening before, with reference to the lavish expenditure involved
+in His anointing, "The poor ye have always with you," the point being that
+Jesus now, "in the clear consciousness of His approaching death, feels His
+own worth," and dismisses "the contingency of even the poor having to lose
+something for His sake" with the words "it does not matter."(227)
+
+All these transpositions and new connexions mean, it is clear, a great
+deal of internal and external violence to the text.
+
+A further service rendered by this very thorough work of Oskar
+Holtzmann's, is that of showing how much reading between the lines is
+necessary in order to construct a Life of Jesus on the basis of the Marcan
+hypothesis in its modern interpretation. It is thus, for instance, that
+the author must have acquired the knowledge that the controversy about the
+ordinances of purification in Mark vii. forced the people "to choose
+between the old and the new religion"--in which case it is no wonder that
+many "turned back from following Jesus."
+
+Where are we told that there was any question of an old and a new
+"religion"? The disciples certainly did not think of things in this way,
+as is shown by their conduct at the time of His death and the discourses
+of Peter in Acts. Where do we read that the people turned away from Jesus?
+In Mark vii. 17 and 24 all that is said is, that Jesus left the people,
+and in Mark vii. 33 the same multitude is still assembled when Jesus
+returns from the "banishment" into which Holtzmann relegates Him.
+
+Oskar Holtzmann declares that we cannot tell what was the size of the
+following which accompanied Jesus in His journey northwards, and is
+inclined to assume that others besides the Twelve shared His exile. The
+Evangelists, however, say clearly that it was only the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}, that is,
+the Twelve, who were with Him. The value which this special knowledge,
+independent of the text, has for the author, becomes evident a little
+farther on. After Peter's confession Jesus calls the "multitude" to Him
+(Mark viii. 34) and speaks to them of His sufferings and of taking up the
+cross and following Him. This "multitude" Holtzmann wants to make "the
+whole company of Jesus' followers," "to which belonged, not only the
+Twelve whom Jesus had formerly sent out to preach, but many others also."
+The knowledge drawn from outside the text is therefore required to solve a
+difficulty in the text.
+
+But how did His companions in exile, the remnant of the previous
+multitude, themselves become a multitude, the same multitude as before?
+Would it not be better to admit that we do not know how, in a Gentile
+country, a multitude could suddenly rise out of the ground as it were,
+continue with Him until Mark ix. 30, and then disappear into the earth as
+suddenly as they came, leaving Him to pursue His journey towards Galilee
+and Jerusalem alone?
+
+Another thing which Oskar Holtzmann knows is that it required a good deal
+of courage for Peter to hail Jesus as Messiah, since the "exile wandering
+about with his small following in a Gentile country" answered "so badly to
+the general picture which people had formed of the coming of the Messiah."
+He knows too, that in the moment of Peter's confession, "Christianity was
+complete" in the sense that "a community separate from Judaism and
+centring about a new ideal, then arose." This "community" frequently
+appears from this point onwards. There is nothing about it in the
+narratives, which know only the Twelve and the people.
+
+Oskar Holtzmann's knowledge even extends to dialogues which are not
+reported in the Gospels. After the incident at Caesarea Philippi, the
+minds of the disciples were, according to him, preoccupied by two
+questions. "How did Jesus know that He was the Messiah?" and "What will be
+the future fate of this Messiah?" The Lord answered both questions. He
+spoke to them of His baptism, and "doubtless in close connexion with that"
+He told them the story of His temptation, during which He had laid down
+the lines which He was determined to follow as Messiah.
+
+Of the transfiguration, Oskar Holtzmann can state with confidence, "that
+it merely represents the inner experience of the disciples at the moment
+of Peter's confession." How is it then that Mark expressly dates that
+scene, placing it (ix. 2) six days after the discourse of Jesus about
+taking up the cross and following Him? The fact is that the time-
+indications of the text are treated as non-existent whenever the Marcan
+hypothesis requires an order determined by inner connexion. The statement
+of Luke that the transfiguration took place eight days after, is dismissed
+in the remark "the motive of this indication of time is doubtless to be
+found in the use of the Gospel narratives for reading in public worship;
+the idea was that the section about the transfiguration should be read on
+the Sunday following that on which the confession of Peter formed the
+lesson." Where did Oskar Holtzmann suddenly discover this information
+about the order of the "Sunday lessons" at the time when Luke's Gospel was
+written?
+
+It was doubtless from the same private source of information that the
+author derived his knowledge regarding the gradual development of the
+thought of the Passion in the consciousness of Jesus. "After the
+confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi," he explains, "Jesus' death
+became for Him only the necessary point of transition to the glory beyond.
+In the discourse of Jesus to which the request of Salome gave occasion,
+the death of Jesus already appears as the means of saving many from death,
+because His death makes possible the coming of the Kingdom of God. At the
+institution of the Supper, Jesus regards His imminent death as the
+meritorious deed by which the blessings of the New Covenant, the
+forgiveness of sins and victory over sin, are permanently secured to His
+'community.' We see Jesus constantly becoming more and more at home with
+the idea of His death and constantly giving it a deeper interpretation."
+
+Any one who is less skilled in reading the thoughts of Jesus, and more
+simple and natural in his reading of the text of Mark, cannot fail to
+observe that Jesus speaks in Mark x. 45 of His death as an expiation, not
+as a means of saving others from death, and that at the Lord's Supper
+there was no reference to His "community," but only to the inexplicable
+"many," which is also the word in Mark x. 45. We ought to admit freely
+that we do not know what the thoughts of Jesus about His death were at the
+time of the first prediction of the Passion after Peter's confession; and
+to be on our guard against the "original sin" of theology, that of
+exalting the argument from silence, when it happens to be useful, to the
+rank of positive realities.
+
+Is there not a certain irony in the fact that the application of "natural"
+psychology to the explanation of the thoughts of Jesus compels the
+assumption of supra-historical private information such as this? Bahrdt
+and Venturini hardly read more subjective interpretations into the text
+than many modern Lives of Jesus; and the hypothesis of the secret society,
+which after all did recognise and do justice to the inexplicability from
+an external standpoint of the relation of events and of the conduct of
+Jesus, was in many respects more historical than the psychological links
+of connexion which our modernising historians discover without having any
+foundation for them in the text.
+
+In the end this supplementary knowledge destroys the historicity of the
+simplest sections. Oskar Holtzmann ventures to conjecture that the healing
+of the blind man at Jericho "is to be understood as a symbolical
+representation of the conversion of Zacchaeus," which, of course, is found
+only in Luke. Here then the defender of the Marcan hypothesis rejects the
+incident by which the Evangelist explains the enthusiasm of the entry into
+Jerusalem, not to mention that Luke tells us nothing whatever about a
+conversion of Zacchaeus, but only that Jesus was invited to his house and
+graciously accepted the invitation.
+
+It would be something if this almost Alexandrian symbolical exegesis
+contributed in some way to the removal of difficulties and to the solution
+of the main question, that, namely, of the present or future Messiah, the
+present or future Kingdom. Oskar Holtzmann lays great stress upon the
+eschatological character of the preaching of Jesus regarding the Kingdom,
+and assumes that, at least at the beginning, it would not have been
+natural for His hearers to understand that Jesus, the herald of the
+Messiah, was Himself the Messiah. Nevertheless, he is of opinion that, in
+a certain sense, the presence of Jesus implied the presence of the
+Kingdom, that Peter and the rest of the disciples, advancing beyond the
+ideas of the multitude, recognised Him as Messiah, that this recognition
+ought to have been possible for the people also, and, in that case, would
+have been "the strongest incentive to abandon evil ways," and "that Jesus
+at the time of His entry into Jerusalem seems to have felt that in Isa.
+lxii. 11(228) there was a direct command not to withhold the knowledge of
+His Messiahship from the inhabitants of Jerusalem."
+
+But if Jesus made a Messianic entry He must thereafter have given Himself
+out as Messiah, and the whole controversy would necessarily have turned
+upon this claim. This, however, was not the case. According to Holtzmann,
+all that the hearers could make out of that crucial question for the
+Messiahship in Mark xii. 35-37 was only "that Jesus clearly showed from
+the Scriptures that the Messiah was not in reality the son of David."(229)
+
+But how was it that the Messianic enthusiasm on the part of the people did
+not lead to a Messianic controversy, in spite of the fact that Jesus "from
+the first came forward in Jerusalem as Messiah"? This difficulty O.
+Holtzmann seems to be trying to provide against when he remarks in a
+footnote: "We have no evidence that Jesus, even during the last sojourn in
+Jerusalem, was recognised as Messiah except by those who belonged to the
+inner circle of disciples. The repetition by the children of the
+acclamations of the disciples (Matt. xxi. 15 and 16) can hardly be
+considered of much importance in this connexion." According to this, Jesus
+entered Jerusalem as Messiah, but except for the disciples and a few
+children no one recognised His entry as having a Messianic significance!
+But Mark states that many spread their garments upon the way, and others
+plucked down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way, and that
+those that went before and those that followed after, cried "Hosanna!" The
+Marcan narrative must therefore be kept out of sight for the moment in
+order that the Life of Jesus as conceived by the modern Marcan hypothesis
+may not be endangered.
+
+We should not, however, regard the evidence of supernatural knowledge and
+the self-contradictions of this Life of Jesus as a matter for censure, but
+rather as a proof of the merits of O. Holtzmann's work.(230) He has
+written the last large-scale Life of Jesus, the only one which the Marcan
+hypothesis has produced, and aims at providing a scientific basis for the
+assumptions which the general lines of that hypothesis compel him to make;
+and in this process it becomes clearly apparent that the connexion of
+events can only be carried through at the decisive passages by violent
+treatment, or even by rejection of the Marcan text in the interests of the
+Marcan hypothesis.
+
+These merits do not belong in the same measure to the other modern Lives
+of Jesus, which follow more or less the same lines. They are short
+sketches, in some cases based on lectures, and their brevity makes them
+perhaps more lively and convincing than Holtzmann's work; but they take
+for granted just what he felt it necessary to prove. P. W. Schmidt's(231)
+_Geschichte Jesu_ (1899), which as a work of literary art has few rivals
+among theological works of recent years, confines itself to pure
+narrative. The volume of prolegomena which appeared in 1904, and is
+intended to exhibit the foundations of the narrative, treats of the
+sources, of the Kingdom of God, of the Son of Man, and of the Law. It
+makes the most of the weakening of the eschatological standpoint which is
+manifested in the second edition of Johannes Weiss's "Preaching of Jesus,"
+but it does not give sufficient prominence to the difficulties of
+reconstructing the public ministry of Jesus.
+
+Neither Otto Schmiedel's "The Principal Problems of the Study of the Life
+of Jesus," nor von Soden's "Vacation Lectures" on "The Principal Questions
+in the Life of Jesus" fulfils the promise of its title.(232) They both aim
+rather at solving new problems proposed by themselves than at restating
+the old ones and adding new. They hope to meet the views of Johannes Weiss
+by strongly emphasising the eschatology, and think they can escape the
+critical scepticism of writers like Volkmar and Brand by assuming an "Ur-
+Markus." Their view is, therefore, that with a few modifications dictated
+by the eschatological and sceptical school, the traditional conception of
+the Life of Jesus is still tenable, whereas it is just the a priori
+presuppositions of this conception, hitherto held to be self-evident,
+which constitute the main problems.
+
+"It is self-evident," says von Soden in one passage, "in view of the inner
+connexion in which the Kingdom of God and the Messiah stood in the
+thoughts of the people ... that in all classes the question must have been
+discussed, so that Jesus could not permanently have avoided their
+question, 'What of the Messiah? Art thou not He?' " Where, in the
+Synoptics, is there a word to show that this is "self-evident"? When the
+disciples in Mark viii. tell Jesus "whom men held Him to be," none of them
+suggests that any one had been tempted to regard Him as the Messiah. And
+that was shortly before Jesus set out for Jerusalem.
+
+From the day when the envoys of the Scribes from Jerusalem first appeared
+in the north, the easily influenced Galilaean multitude began, according
+to von Soden, "to waver." How does he know that the Galilaeans were easily
+influenced? How does he know they "wavered"? The Gospels tell us neither
+one nor the other. The demand for a sign was, to quote von Soden again, a
+demand for a proof of His Messiahship. "Yet another indication," adds the
+author, "that later Christianity, in putting so high a value on the
+miracles of Jesus as a proof of His Messiahship, departed widely from the
+thoughts of Jesus."
+
+Before levelling reproaches of this kind against later Christianity, it
+would be well to point to some passage of Mark or Matthew in which there
+is mention of a demand for a sign as a proof of His Messiahship.
+
+When the appearance of Jesus in the south--we are still following von
+Soden--aroused the Messianic expectations of the people, as they had
+formerly been aroused in His native country, "they once more failed to
+understand the correction of them which Jesus had made by the manner of
+His entry and His conduct in Jerusalem." They are unable to understand
+this "transvaluation of values," and as often as the impression made by
+His personality suggested the thought that He was the Messiah, they became
+doubtful again. Wherein consisted the correction of the Messianic
+expectation given at the triumphal entry? Was it that He rode upon an ass?
+Would it not be better if modern historical theology, instead of always
+making the people "grow doubtful," were to grow a little doubtful of
+itself, and begin to look for the evidence of that "transvaluation of
+values" which, according to them, the contemporaries of Jesus were not
+able to follow?
+
+Von Soden also possesses special information about the "peculiar history
+of the origin" of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus. He knows that it
+was subsidiary to a primary general religious consciousness of Sonship.
+The rise of this Messianic consciousness implies, in its turn, the
+"transformation of the conception of the Kingdom of God, and explains how
+in the mind of Jesus this conception was both present and future." The
+greatness of Jesus is, he thinks, to be found in the fact that for Him
+this Kingdom of God was only a "limiting conception"--the ultimate goal of
+a gradual process of approximation. "To the question whether it was to be
+realised here or in the beyond Jesus would have answered, as He answered a
+similar question, 'That, no man knoweth; no, not the Son.' "
+
+As if He had not answered that question in the petition "Thy Kingdom
+come"--supposing that such a question could ever have occurred to a
+contemporary--in the sense that the Kingdom was to pass from the beyond
+into the present!
+
+This modern historical theology will not allow Jesus to have formed a
+"theory" to explain His thoughts about His passion. "For Him the certainty
+was amply sufficient; 'My death will effect what My life has not been able
+to accomplish.' "
+
+Is there then no theory implied in the saying about the "ransom for many,"
+and in that about "My blood which is shed for many for the forgiveness of
+sins," although Jesus does not explain it? How does von Soden know what
+was "amply sufficient" for Jesus or what was not?
+
+Otto Schmiedel goes so far as to deny that Jesus gave distinct expression
+to an expectation of suffering; the most He can have done--and this is only
+a "perhaps"--is to have hinted at it in His discourses.
+
+In strong contrast with this confidence in committing themselves to
+historical conjectures stands the scepticism with which von Soden and
+Schmiedel approach the Gospels. "It is at once evident," says Schmiedel,
+"that the great groups of discourses in Matthew, such as the Sermon on the
+Mount, the Seven Parables of the Kingdom, and so forth, were not arranged
+in this order in the source (the _Logia_), still less by Jesus Himself.
+The order is, doubtless, due to the Evangelist. But what is the answer to
+the question, 'On what grounds is this "at once" clear?' "(233)
+
+Von Soden's pronouncement is even more radical. "In the composition of the
+discourses," he says, "no regard is paid in Matthew, any more than in
+John, to the supposed audience, or to the point of time in the life of
+Jesus to which they are attributed." As early as the Sermon on the Mount
+we find references to persecutions, and warnings against false prophets.
+Similarly, in the charge to the Twelve, there are also warnings, which
+undoubtedly belong to a later time. Intimate sayings, evidently intended
+for the inner circle of disciples, have the widest publicity given to
+them.
+
+But why should whatever is incomprehensible to us be unhistorical? Would
+it not be better simply to admit that we do not understand certain
+connexions of ideas and turns of expression in the discourses of Jesus?
+
+But instead even of making an analytical examination of the apparent
+connexions, and stating them as problems, the discourses of Jesus and the
+sections of the Gospels are tricked out with ingenious headings which have
+nothing to do with them. Thus, for instance, von Soden heads the
+Beatitudes (Matt. v. 3-12), "What Jesus brings to men," the following
+verses (Matt. v. 13-16), "What He makes of men." P. W. Schmidt, in his
+"History of Jesus," shows himself a past master in this art. "The rights
+of the wife" is the title of the dialogue about divorce, as if the
+question at stake had been for Jesus the equality of the sexes, and not
+simply and solely the sanctity of marriage. "Sunshine for the children" is
+his heading for the scene where Jesus takes the children in His arms--as if
+the purpose of Jesus had been to protest against severity in the
+upbringing of children. Again, he brings together the stories of the man
+who must first bury his father, of the rich young man, of the dispute
+about precedence, of Zacchaeus, and others which have equally little
+connexion under the heading "Discipline for Jesus' followers." These often
+brilliant creations of artificial connexions of thought give a curious
+attractiveness to the works of Schmidt and von Soden. The latter's survey
+of the Gospels is a really delightful performance. But this kind of thing
+is not consistent with pure objective history.
+
+Disposing in this lofty fashion of the connexion of events, Schmiedel and
+von Soden do not find it difficult to distinguish between Mark and "Ur-
+Markus"; that is, to retain just so much of the Gospel as will fit in to
+their construction. Schmiedel feels sure that Mark was a skilful writer,
+and that the redactor was "a Christian of Pauline sympathies." According
+to "Ur-Markus," to which Mark iv. 33 belongs, the Lord speaks in parables
+in order that the people may understand Him the better; "it was only by
+the redactor that the Pauline theory about hardening their hearts (Rom.
+ix.-xi.) was interpolated, in Mark iv. 10 ff., and the meaning of Mark iv.
+33 was thus obscured."
+
+It is high time that instead of merely asserting Pauline influences in
+Mark some proof of the assertion should be given. What kind of appearance
+would Mark have presented if it had really passed through the hands of a
+Pauline Christian?
+
+Von Soden's analysis is no less confident. The three outstanding miracles,
+the stilling of the storm, the casting out of the legion of devils, the
+overcoming of death (Mark iv. 35-v. 43), the romantically told story of
+the death of the Baptist (Mark vi. 17-29), the story of the feeding of the
+multitudes in the desert, of Jesus' walking on the water, and of the
+transfiguration upon an high mountain, and the healing of the lunatic
+boy--all these are dashed in with a broad brush, and offer many analogies
+to Old Testament stories, and some suggestions of Pauline conceptions, and
+reflections of experiences of individual believers and of the Christian
+community. "All these passages were, doubtless, first written down by the
+compiler of our Gospel."
+
+But how can Schmiedel and von Soden fail to see that they are heading
+straight for Bruno Bauer's position? They assert that there is no
+distinction of principle between the way in which the Johannine and the
+Synoptic discourses are composed: the recognition of this was Bruno
+Bauer's starting-point. They propose to find experiences of the Christian
+community and Pauline teaching reflected in the Gospel of Mark; Bruno
+Bauer asserted the same. The only difference is that he was consistent,
+and extended his criticism to those portions of the Gospel which do not
+present the stumbling-block of the supernatural. Why should these not also
+contain the theology and the experiences of the community transformed into
+history? Is it only because they remain within the limits of the natural?
+
+The real difficulty consists in the fact that all the passages which von
+Soden ascribes to the redactor stand, in spite of their mythical
+colouring, in a closely-knit historical connexion; in fact, the historical
+connexion is nowhere so close. How can any one cut out the feeding of the
+multitudes and the transfiguration as narratives of secondary origin
+without destroying the whole of the historical fabric of the Gospel of
+Mark? Or was it the redactor who created the plan of the Gospel of Mark,
+as von Soden seems to imply?(234)
+
+But in that case how can a modern Life of Jesus be founded on the Marcan
+plan? How much of Mark is, in the end, historical? Why should not Peter's
+confession at Caesarea Philippi have been derived from the theology of the
+primitive Church, just as well as the transfiguration? The only difference
+is that the incident at Caesarea Philippi is more within the limits of the
+possible, whereas the scene upon the mountain has a supernatural
+colouring. But is the incident at Philippi so entirely natural? Whence
+does Peter know that Jesus is the Messiah?
+
+This semi-scepticism is therefore quite unjustifiable, since in Mark
+natural and supernatural both stand in an equally good and close
+historical connexion. Either, then, one must be completely sceptical like
+Bruno Bauer, and challenge without exception all the facts and connexions
+of events asserted by Mark; or, if one means to found an historical Life
+of Jesus upon Mark, one must take the Gospel as a whole because of the
+plan which runs right through it, accepting it as historical and then
+endeavouring to explain why certain narratives, like the feeding of the
+multitude and the transfiguration, are bathed in a supernatural light, and
+what is the historical basis which underlies them. A division between the
+natural and supernatural in Mark is purely arbitrary, because the
+supernatural is an essential part of the history. The mere fact that he
+has not adopted the mythical material of the childhood stories and the
+post-resurrection scenes ought to have been accepted as evidence that the
+supernatural material which he does embody belongs to a category of its
+own and cannot be simply rejected as due to the invention of the primitive
+Christian community. It must belong in some way to the original tradition.
+
+Oskar Holtzmann realises that to a certain extent. According to him Mark
+is a writer "who embodied the materials which he received from the
+tradition more faithfully than discriminatingly." "That which was related
+as a symbol of inner events, he takes as history--in the case, for example,
+of the temptation, the walking on the sea, the transfiguration of Jesus."
+"Again in other cases he has made a remarkable occurrence into a
+supernatural miracle, as in the case of the feeding of the multitude,
+where Jesus' courageous love and ready organising skill overcame a
+momentary difficulty, whereas the Evangelist represents it as an amazing
+miracle of Divine omnipotence."
+
+Oskar Holtzmann is thus more cautious than von Soden. He is inclined to
+see in the material which he wishes to exclude from the history, not so
+much inventions of the Church as mistaken shaping of history by Mark, and
+in this way he gets back to genuine old-fashioned rationalism. In the
+feeding of the multitude Jesus showed "the confidence of a courageous
+housewife who knows how to provide skilfully for a great crowd of children
+from small resources." Perhaps in a future work Oskar Holtzmann will be
+less reserved, not for the sake of theology, but of national well-being,
+and will inform his contemporaries what kind of domestic economy it was
+which made it possible for the Lord to satisfy with five loaves and two
+fishes several thousand hungry men.
+
+Modern historical theology, therefore, with its three-quarters scepticism,
+is left at last with only a torn and tattered Gospel of Mark in its hands.
+One would naturally suppose that these preliminary operations upon the
+source would lead to the production of a Life of Jesus of a similarly
+fragmentary character. Nothing of the kind. The outline is still the same
+as in Schenkel's day, and the confidence with which the construction is
+carried out is not less complete. Only the catch-words with which the
+narrative is enlivened have been changed, being now taken in part from
+Nietzsche. The liberal Jesus has given place to the Germanic Jesus. This
+is a figure which has as little to do with the Marcan hypothesis as the
+"liberal" Jesus had which preceded it; otherwise it could not so easily
+have survived the downfall of the Gospel of Mark as an historical source.
+It is evident, therefore, that this professedly historical Jesus is not a
+purely historical figure, but one which has been artificially transplanted
+into history. As formerly in Renan the romantic spirit created the
+personality of Jesus in its own image, so at the present day the Germanic
+spirit is making a Jesus after its own likeness. What is admitted as
+historic is just what the Spirit of the time can take out of the records
+in order to assimilate it to itself and bring out of it a living form.
+
+Frenssen betrays the secret of his teachers when in _Hilligenlei_ he
+confidently superscribes the narrative drawn from the "latest critical
+investigations" with the title "The Life of the Saviour portrayed
+according to German research as the basis for a spiritual re-birth of the
+German nation."(235)
+
+As a matter of fact the Life of Jesus of the "Manuscript"(236) is
+unsatisfactory both scientifically and artistically, just because it aims
+at being at once scientific and artistic. If only Frenssen, with his
+strongly life-accepting instinct, which gives to his thinking, at least in
+his earliest writings where he reveals himself without artificiality, such
+a wonderful simplicity and force, had dared to read his Jesus boldly from
+the original records, without following modern historical theology in all
+its meanderings! He would have been able to force his way through the
+underwood well enough if only he had been content to break the branches
+that got in his way, instead of always waiting until some one went in
+front to disentwine them for him. The dependence to which he surrenders
+himself is really distressing. In reading almost every paragraph one can
+tell whether Kai Jans was looking, as he wrote it, into Oskar Holtzmann or
+P. W. Schmidt or von Soden. Frenssen resigns the dramatic scene of the
+healing of the blind man at Jericho. Why? Because at this point he was
+listening to Holtzmann, who proposes to regard the healing of the blind
+man as only a symbolical representation of the "conversion of Zacchaeus."
+Frenssen's masters have robbed him of all creative spontaneity. He does
+not permit himself to discover _motifs_ for himself, but confines himself
+to working over and treating in cruder colours those which he finds in his
+teachers.
+
+And since he cannot veil his assumptions in the cautious, carefully
+modulated language of the theologians, the faults of the modern treatment
+of the life of Jesus appear in him exaggerated an hundredfold. The violent
+dislocation of narratives from their connexion, and the forcing upon them
+of a modern interpretation, becomes a mania with the writer and a torture
+to the reader. The range of knowledge not drawn from the text is
+infinitely increased. Kai Jans sees Jesus after the temptation cowering
+beneath the brow of the hill "a poor lonely man, torn by fearful doubts, a
+man in the deepest distress." He knows too that there was often great
+danger that Jesus would "betray the 'Father in heaven' and go back to His
+village to take up His handicraft again, but now as a man with a torn and
+distracted soul and a conscience tortured by the gnawings of remorse."
+
+The pupil is not content, as his teachers had been, merely to make the
+people sometimes believe in Jesus and sometimes doubt Him; he makes the
+enthusiastic earthly Messianic belief of the people "tug and tear" at
+Jesus Himself. Sometimes one is tempted to ask whether the author in his
+zeal "to use conscientiously the results of the whole range of scientific
+criticism" has not forgotten the main thing, the study of the Gospels
+themselves.
+
+And is all this science supposed to be new?(237) Is this picture of Jesus
+really the outcome of the latest criticism? Has it not been in existence
+since the beginning of the 'forties, since Weisse's criticism of the
+Gospel history? Is it not in principle the same as Renan's, only that
+Germanic lapses of taste here take the place of Gallic, and "German art
+for German people,"(238) here quite out of place, has done its best to
+remove from the picture every trace of fidelity?
+
+Kai Jans' "Manuscript" represents the limit of the process of diminishing
+the personality of Jesus. Weisse left Him still some greatness, something
+unexplained, and did not venture to apply to everything the petty
+standards of inquisitive modern psychology. In the 'sixties psychology
+became more confident and Jesus smaller; at the close of the century the
+confidence of psychology is at its greatest and the figure of Jesus at its
+smallest--so small, that Frenssen ventures to let His life be projected and
+written by one who is in the midst of a love affair!
+
+This human life of Jesus is to be "heart-stirring" from beginning to end,
+and "in no respect to go beyond human standards"! And this Jesus who
+"racks His brains and shapes His plans" is to contribute to bring about a
+re-birth of the German people. How could He? He is Himself only a phantom
+created by the Germanic mind in pursuit of a religious will-o'-the-wisp.
+
+It is possible, however, to do injustice to Frenssen's presentation, and
+to the whole of the confident, unconsciously modernising criticism of
+which he here acts as the mouthpiece. These writers have the great merit
+of having brought certain cultured circles nearer to Jesus and made them
+more sympathetic towards Him. Their fault lies in their confidence, which
+has blinded them to what Jesus is and is not, what He can and cannot do,
+so that in the end they fail to understand "the signs of the times" either
+as historians or as men of the present.
+
+If the Jesus who owes His birth to the Marcan hypothesis and modern
+psychology were capable of regenerating the world He would have done it
+long ago, for He is nearly sixty years old and his latest portraits are
+much less life-like than those drawn by Weisse, Schenkel, and Renan, or by
+Keim, the most brilliant painter of them all.
+
+For the last ten years modern historical theology has more and more
+adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street. More and more, even
+in the best class of works, it makes use of attractive head-lines as a
+means of presenting its results in a lively form to the masses.
+Intoxicated with its own ingenuity in inventing these, it becomes more and
+more confident in its cause, and has come to believe that the world's
+salvation depends in no small measure upon the spreading of its own
+"assured results" broad-cast among the people. It is time that it should
+begin to doubt itself, to doubt its "historical" Jesus, to doubt the
+confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral
+and religious regeneration of our time. Its Jesus is not alive, however
+Germanic they may make Him.
+
+It was no accident that the chief priest of "German art for German people"
+found himself at one with the modern theologians and offered them his
+alliance. Since the 'sixties the critical study of the Life of Jesus in
+Germany has been unconsciously under the influence of an imposing modern-
+religious nationalism in art. It has been deflected by it as by an
+underground magnetic current. It was in vain that a few purely historical
+investigators uplifted their voices in protest. The process had to work
+itself out. For historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of
+those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic
+religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.(239) It was
+concerned for the religious interests of the present. Therefore its error
+had a kind of greatness, it was in fact the greatest thing about it; and
+the severity with which the pure historian treats it is in proportion to
+his respect for its spirit. For this German critical study of the Life of
+Jesus is an essential part of German religion. As of old Jacob wrestled
+with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and
+will not let Him go until He bless it--that is, until He will consent to
+serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into
+the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when the day breaks, the
+wrestler must let Him go. He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of
+Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. As an historic figure
+He refuses to be detached from His own time. He has no answer for the
+question, "Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!" But He does
+bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take
+Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received
+strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready
+to do battle with the world and its powers.
+
+But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together
+except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both
+religion and history. A time will come when our theology, with its pride
+in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This
+bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time,
+the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of
+Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning.
+The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image,
+so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but
+the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is
+set to work upon our race.
+
+Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak.
+Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the
+modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate
+in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because
+instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the
+Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually
+forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have
+accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment
+from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching
+sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
+
+Anyone who, admiring the force and authority of genuine rationalism, has
+got rid of the naive self-satisfaction of modern theology, which is in
+essence only the degenerate offspring of rationalism with a tincture of
+history, rejoices in the feebleness and smallness of its professedly
+historical Jesus, rejoices in all those who are beginning to doubt the
+truth of this portrait, rejoices in the over-severity with which it is
+attacked, rejoices to take a share in its destruction.
+
+Those who have begun to doubt are many, but most of them only make known
+their doubts by their silence. There is one, however, who has spoken out,
+and one of the greatest--Otto Pfleiderer.(240)
+
+In the first edition of his _Urchristentum_, published in 1887, he still
+shared the current conceptions and constructions, except that he held the
+credibility of Mark to be more affected than was usually supposed by
+hypothetical Pauline influences. In the second edition(241) his positive
+knowledge has been ground down in the struggle with the sceptics--it is
+Brandt who has especially affected him--and with the partisans of
+eschatology. This is the first advance-guard action of modern theology
+coming into touch with the troops of Reimarus and Bruno Bauer.
+
+Pfleiderer accepts the purely eschatological conception of the Kingdom of
+God and holds also that the ethics of Jesus were wholly conditioned by
+eschatology. But in regard to the question of the Messiahship of Jesus he
+takes his stand with the sceptics. He rejects the hypothesis of a Messiah
+who, as being a "spiritual Messiah," conceals His claim, but on the other
+hand, he cannot accept the eschatological Son-of-Man Messiahship having
+reference to the future, which the eschatological school finds in the
+utterances of Jesus, since it implies prophecies of His suffering, death,
+and resurrection which criticism cannot admit. "Instead of finding the
+explanation of how the Messianic title arose in the reflections of Jesus
+about the death which lay before Him," he is inclined to find it "rather
+in the reflection of the Christian community upon the catastrophic death
+and exaltation of its Lord after this had actually taken place."
+
+Even the Marcan narrative is not history. The scepticism in regard to the
+main source, with which writers like Oskar Holtzmann, Schmiedel, and von
+Soden conduct a kind of intellectual flirtation, is here erected into a
+principle. "It must be recognised," says Pfleiderer, "that in respect of
+the recasting of the history under theological influences, the whole of
+our Gospels stand in principle on the same footing. The distinction
+between Mark, the other two Synoptists, and John is only relative--a
+distinction of degree corresponding to different stages of theological
+reflection and the development of the ecclesiastical consciousness." If
+only Bruno Bauer could have lived to see this triumph of his opinions!
+
+Pfleiderer, however, is conscious that scepticism, too, has its
+difficulties. He wishes, indeed, to reject the confession of Jesus before
+the Sanhedrin "because its historicity is not well established (none of
+the disciples were present to hear it, and the apocalyptic prophecy which
+is added, Mark xiv. 62, is certainly derived from the ideas of the
+primitive Church)"; on the other hand, he is inclined to admit as
+possibilities--though marking them with a note of interrogation--that Jesus
+may have accepted the homage of the Passover pilgrims, and that the
+controversy with the Scribes about the Son of David had some kind of
+reference to Jesus Himself.
+
+On the other hand, he takes it for granted that Jesus did not prophesy His
+death, on the ground that the arrest, trial, and betrayal must have lain
+outside all possibility of calculation even for Him. All these, he thinks,
+came upon Jesus quite unexpectedly. The only thing that He might have
+apprehended was "an attack by hired assassins," and it is to this that He
+refers in the saying about the two swords in Luke xxii. 36 and 38, seeing
+that two swords would have sufficed as a protection against such an attack
+as that, though hardly for anything further. When, however, he remarks in
+this connexion that "this has been constantly overlooked" in the romances
+dealing with the Life of Jesus, he does injustice to Bahrdt and Venturini,
+since according to them the chief concern of the secret society in the
+later period of the life of Jesus was to protect Jesus from the
+assassination with which He was menaced, and to secure His formal arrest
+and trial by the Sanhedrin. Their view of the historical situation is
+therefore identical with Pfleiderer's, viz. that assassination was
+possible, but that administrative action was unexpected and is
+inexplicable.
+
+But how is this Jesus to be connected with primitive Christianity? How did
+the primitive Church's belief in the Messiahship of Jesus arise? To that
+question Pfleiderer can give no other answer than that of Volkmar and
+Brandt, that is to say, none. He laboriously brings together wood, straw,
+and stubble, but where he gets the fire from to kindle the whole into the
+ardent faith of primitive Christianity he is unable to make clear.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+According to Albert Kalthoff,(242) the fire lighted itself--Christianity
+arose--by spontaneous combustion, when the inflammable material, religious
+and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came in
+contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations. Jesus of Nazareth never
+existed; and even supposing He had been one of the numerous Jewish
+Messiahs who were put to death by crucifixion, He certainly did not found
+Christianity. The story of Jesus which lies before us in the Gospels is in
+reality only the story of the way in which the picture of Christ arose,
+that is to say, the story of the growth of the Christian community. There
+is therefore no problem of the Life of Jesus, but only a problem of the
+Christ.
+
+Kalthoff has not indeed always been so negative. When in the year 1880 he
+gave a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus he felt himself justified
+"in taking as his basis without further argument the generally accepted
+results of modern theology." Afterwards he became so completely doubtful
+about the Christ after the flesh whom he had at that time depicted before
+his hearers that he wished to exclude Him even from the register of
+theological literature, and omitted to enter these lectures in the list of
+his writings, although they had appeared in print.(243)
+
+His quarrel with the historical Jesus of modern theology was that he could
+find no connecting link between the Life of Jesus constructed by the
+latter and primitive Christianity. Modern theology, he remarks in one
+passage, with great justice, finds itself obliged to assume, at the point
+where the history of the Church begins, "an immediate declension from, and
+falsification of, a pure original principle," and that in so doing "it is
+deserting the recognised methods of historical science." If then we cannot
+trace the path from its beginning onwards, we had better try to work
+backwards, endeavouring first to define in the theology of the primitive
+Church the values which we shall look to find again in the Life of Jesus.
+
+In that he is right. Modern historical theology will not have refuted him
+until it has explained how Christianity arose out of the life of Jesus
+without calling in that theory of an initial "Fall" of which Harnack,
+Wernle, and all the rest make use. Until this modern theology has made it
+in some measure intelligible how, under the influence of the Jewish
+Messiah-sect, in the twinkling of an eye, in every direction at once,
+Graeco-Roman popular Christianity arose; until at least it has described
+the popular Christianity of the first three generations, it must concede
+to all hypotheses which fairly face this problem and endeavour to solve it
+their formal right of existence.
+
+The criticism which Kalthoff directs against the "positive" accounts of
+the Life of Jesus is, in part, very much to the point. "Jesus," he says in
+one place, "has been made the receptacle into which every theologian pours
+his own ideas." He rightly remarks that if we follow "the Christ"
+backwards from the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament right to the
+apocalyptic vision of Daniel, we always find in Him superhuman traits
+alongside of the human. "Never and nowhere," he insists, "is He that which
+critical theology has endeavoured to make out of Him, a purely natural
+man, an indivisible historical unit." "The title of 'Christ' had been
+raised by the Messianic apocalyptic writings so completely into the sphere
+of the heroic that it had become impossible to apply it to a mere
+historical man." Bruno Bauer had urged the same considerations upon the
+theology of his time, declaring it to be unthinkable that a man could have
+arisen among the Jews and declared "I am the Messiah."
+
+But the unfortunate thing is that Kalthoff has not worked through Bruno
+Bauer's criticism, and does not appear to assume it as a basis, but
+remains standing half-way instead of thinking the questions through to the
+end as that keen critic did. According to Kalthoff it would appear that,
+year in year out, there was a constant succession of Messianic
+disturbances among the Jews and of crucified claimants of the Messiahship.
+"There had been many a 'Christ,'" he says in one place, "before there was
+any question of a Jesus in connexion with this title."
+
+How does Kalthoff know that? If he had fairly considered and felt the
+force of Bruno Bauer's arguments, he would never have ventured on this
+assertion; he would have learned that it is not only historically
+unproved, but intrinsically impossible.
+
+But Kalthoff was in far too great a hurry to present to his readers a
+description of the growth of Christianity, and therewith of the picture of
+the Christ, to absorb thoroughly the criticism of his great predecessor.
+He soon leads his reader away from the high road of criticism into a
+morass of speculation, in order to arrive by a short cut at Graeco-Roman
+primitive Christianity. But the trouble is that while the guide walks
+lightly and safely, the ordinary man, weighed down by the pressure of
+historical considerations, sinks to rise no more.
+
+The conjectural argument which Kalthoff follows out is in itself acute,
+and forms a suitable pendant to Bauer's reconstruction of the course of
+events. Bauer proposed to derive Christianity from the Graeco-Roman
+philosophy; Kalthoff, recognising that the origin of popular Christianity
+constitutes the main question, takes as his starting-point the social
+movements of the time.
+
+In the Roman Empire, so runs his argument, among the oppressed masses of
+the slaves and the populace, eruptive forces were concentrated under high
+tension. A communistic movement arose, to which the influence of the
+Jewish element in the proletariat gave a Messianic-Apocalyptic colouring.
+The Jewish synagogue influenced Roman social conditions so that "the crude
+social ferment at work in the Roman Empire amalgamated itself with the
+religious and philosophical forces of the time to form the new Christian
+social movement." Early Christian writers had learned in the synagogue to
+construct "personifications." The whole Late-Jewish literature rests upon
+this principle. Thus "the Christ" became the ideal hero of the Christian
+community, "from the socio-religious standpoint the figure of Christ is
+the sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical
+forces which were at work at a certain period." The Lord's Supper was the
+memorial feast of this ideal hero.
+
+"As the Christ to whose Parousia the community looks forward this Hero-god
+of the community bears within Himself the capacity for expansion into the
+God of the universe, into the Christ of the Church, who is identical in
+essential nature with God the Father. Thus the belief in the Christ
+brought the Messianic hope of the future into the minds of the masses, who
+had already a certain organisation, and by directing their thoughts
+towards the future it won all those who were sick of the past and
+despairing about the present."
+
+The death and resurrection of Jesus represent experiences of the
+community. "For a Jew crucified under Pontius Pilate there was certainly
+no resurrection. All that is possible is a vague hypothesis of a vision
+lacking all historical reality, or an escape into the vaguenesses of
+theological phraseology. But for the Christian community the resurrection
+was something real, a matter of fact. For the community as such was not
+annihilated in that persecution: it drew from it, rather, new strength and
+life."
+
+But what about the foundations of this imposing structure?
+
+For what he has to tell us about the condition of the Roman Empire and the
+social organisation of the proletariat in the time of Trajan--for it was
+then that the Church first came out into the light--we may leave the
+responsibility with Kalthoff. But we must inquire more closely how he
+brings the Jewish apocalyptic into contact with the Roman proletariat.
+
+Communism, he says, was common to both. It was the bond which united the
+apocalyptic "other-worldliness" with reality. The only difficulty is that
+Kalthoff omits to produce any proof out of the Jewish apocalypses that
+communism was "the fundamental economic idea of the apocalyptic writers."
+He operates from the first with a special preparation of apocalyptic
+thought, of a socialistic or Hellenistic character. Messianism is supposed
+to have taken its rise from the Deuteronomic reform as "a social theory
+which strives to realise itself in practice." The apocalyptic of Daniel
+arose, according to him, under Platonic influence. "The figure of the
+Messiah thus became a human figure; it lost its specifically Jewish
+traits." He is the heavenly proto-typal ideal man. Along with this
+thought, and similarly derived from Plato, the conception of immortality
+makes its appearance in apocalyptic.(244) This Platonic apocalyptic never
+had any existence, or at least, to speak with the utmost possible caution,
+its existence must not be asserted in the absence of all proof.
+
+But, supposing it were admitted that Jewish apocalyptic had some affinity
+for the Hellenic world, that it was Platonic and communistic, how are we
+to explain the fact that the Gospels, which describe the genesis of Christ
+and Christianity, imply a Galilaean and not a Roman environment?
+
+As a matter of fact, Kalthoff says, they do imply a Roman environment. The
+scene of the Gospel history is laid in Palestine, but it is drawn in Rome.
+The agrarian conditions implied in the narratives and parables are Roman.
+A vineyard with a wine-press of its own could only be found, according to
+Kalthoff, on the large Roman estates. So, too, the legal conditions. The
+right of the creditor to sell the debtor, with his wife and children, is a
+feature of Roman, not of Jewish law.
+
+Peter everywhere symbolises the Church at Rome. The confession of Peter
+had to be transferred to Caesarea Philippi because this town, "as the seat
+of the Roman administration," symbolised for Palestine the political
+presence of Rome.
+
+The woman with the issue was perhaps Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero,
+"who in view of her strong leaning towards Judaism might well be described
+in the symbolical style of the apocalyptic writings as the woman who
+touched the hem of Jesus' garment."
+
+The story of the unfaithful steward alludes to Pope Callixtus, who, when
+the slave of a Christian in high position, was condemned to the mines for
+the crime of embezzlement; that of the woman who was a sinner refers to
+Marcia, the powerful mistress of Commodus, at whose intercession Callixtus
+was released, to be advanced soon afterwards to the bishopric of Rome.
+"These two narratives, therefore," Kalthoff suggests, "which very clearly
+allude to events well known at that time, and doubtless much discussed in
+the Christian community, were admitted into the Gospel to express the
+views of the Church regarding the life-story of a Roman bishop which had
+run its course under the eyes of the community, and thereby to give to the
+events themselves the Church's sanction and interpretation."
+
+Kalthoff does not, unfortunately, mention whether this is a case of
+simple, ingenuous, or of conscious, didactic, Early Christian imagination.
+
+That kind of criticism is a casting out of Satan by the aid of Beelzebub.
+If he was going to invent on this scale, Kalthoff need not have found any
+difficulty in accepting the figure of Jesus evolved by modern theology.
+One feels annoyed with him because, while his thesis is ingenious, and, as
+against "modern theology" has a considerable measure of justification, he
+has worked it out in so uninteresting a fashion. He has no one but himself
+to blame for the fact that instead of leading to the right explanation, it
+only introduced a wearisome and unproductive controversy.(245)
+
+In the end there remains scarcely a shade of distinction between Kalthoff
+and his opponents. They want to bring their "historical Jesus" into the
+midst of our time. He wants to do the same with his "Christ." "A
+secularised Christ," he says, "as the type of the self-determined man who
+amid strife and suffering carries through victoriously, and fully
+realises, His own personality in order to give the infinite fullness of
+love which He bears within Himself as a blessing to mankind--a Christ such
+as that can awaken to new life the antique Christ-type of the Church. He
+is no longer the Christ of the scholar, of the abstract theological
+thinker with his scholastic rules and methods. He is the people's Christ,
+the Christ of the ordinary man, the figure in which all those powers of
+the human soul which are most natural and simple--and therefore most
+exalted and divine--find an expression at once sensible and spiritual." But
+that is precisely the description of the Jesus of modern historical
+theology; why, then, make this long roundabout through scepticism? The
+Christ of Kalthoff is nothing else than the Jesus of those whom he combats
+in such a lofty fashion; the only difference is that he draws his figure
+of Christ in red ink on blotting-paper, and because it is red in colour
+and smudgy in outline, wants to make out that it is something new.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+It is on ethical grounds that Eduard von Hartmann(246) refuses to accept
+the Jesus of modern theology. He finds fault with it because in its
+anxiety to retain a personality which would be of value to religion it
+does not sufficiently distinguish between the authentic and the
+"historical" Jesus. When criticism has removed the paintings-over and
+retouchings to which this authentic portrait of Jesus has been subjected,
+it reaches, according to him, an unrecognisable painting below, in which
+it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any
+religious use and value.
+
+Were it not for the tenacity and the simple fidelity of the epic
+tradition, nothing whatever would have remained of the historic Jesus.
+What has remained is merely of historical and psychological interest.
+
+At His first appearance the historic Jesus was, according to Eduard von
+Hartmann, almost "an impersonal being," since He regarded Himself so
+exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came
+into the question. As time went on, however, He developed a taste for
+glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of
+"abnormal exaltation of personality." In the end He declares Himself to
+His disciples and before the council as Messiah. "When He felt His death
+drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a
+failure, His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the
+unanswered question on His lips, 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' "
+
+It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake
+of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism
+of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of
+Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is "a pessimism of indignation,"
+born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von
+Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he
+does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his
+impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old
+Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has
+an irritating way of still using the name "Jehovah."
+
+Like Reimarus--von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus--he
+is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right "to treat
+the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself." Jesus and His teaching,
+so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us
+strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the
+duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and
+completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it
+consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the
+aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of
+intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of
+"Semitic harshness," finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12,
+where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His
+teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.
+
+His judgment upon Jesus is: "He had no genius, but a certain talent which,
+in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only
+moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous
+weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental
+enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and
+despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in
+it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable
+and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances
+arrived at the idea, which was at that time epidemic,(247) that He was
+Himself the expected Messiah, and in consequence of this met His fate."
+
+It is to be regretted that a mind like Eduard von Hartmann's should not
+have got beyond the externals of the history, and made an effort to grasp
+the simple and impressive greatness of the figure of Jesus in its
+eschatological setting; and that he should imagine he has disposed of the
+strangeness which he finds in Jesus when he has made it as small as
+possible. And yet in another respect there is something satisfactory about
+his book. It is the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus. In
+this battle the victory will rest with true greatness. Others wanted to
+make peace before the struggle, or thought that theologians could fight
+the battle alone, and spare their contemporaries the doubts about the
+historical Jesus through which it was necessary to pass in order to reach
+the eternal Jesus--and to this end they kept preaching reconciliation while
+fighting the battle. They could only preach it on a basis of postulates,
+and postulates make poor preaching! Thus, Juelicher, for example, in his
+latest sketches of the Life of Jesus(248) distinguishes between "Jewish
+and supra-Jewish" in Jesus, and holds that Jesus transferred the ideal of
+the Kingdom of God "to the solid ground of the present, bringing it into
+the course of historical events," and further "associated with the Kingdom
+of God" the idea of development which was utterly opposed to all Jewish
+ideas about the Kingdom. Juelicher also desires to raise "the strongest
+protest against the poor little definition of His preaching which makes it
+consist in nothing further than an announcement of the nearness of the
+Kingdom, and an exhortation to the repentance necessary as a condition for
+attaining the Kingdom."
+
+But when has a protest against the pure truth of history ever been of any
+avail? Why proclaim peace where there is no peace, and attempt to put back
+the clock of time? Is it not enough that Schleiermacher and Ritschl
+succeeded again and again in making theology send on earth peace instead
+of a sword, and does not the weakness of Christian thought as compared
+with the general culture of our time result from the fact that it did not
+face the battle when it ought to have faced it, but persisted in appealing
+to a court of arbitration on which all the sciences were represented, but
+which it had successfully bribed in advance?
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+Now there comes to join the philosophers a jurist. Herr Doctor jur. De
+Jonge lends his aid to Eduard von Hartmann in "destroying the
+ecclesiastical," and "unveiling the Jewish picture of Jesus."(249)
+
+De Jonge is a Jew by birth, baptized in 1889, who on the 22nd of November
+1902 again separated himself from the Christian communion and was desirous
+of being received back "with certain evangelical reservations" into the
+Jewish community. In spite of his faithful observance of the Law, this was
+refused. Now he is waiting "until in the Synagogue of the twentieth
+century a freedom of conscience is accorded to him equal to that which in
+the first century was enjoyed by John, the beloved disciple of Jeschua of
+Nazareth." In the meantime he beguiles the period of waiting by describing
+Jesus and His earliest followers in the character of pattern Jews, and
+sets them to work in the interest of his "Jewish views with evangelical
+reservations."
+
+It is the colourless, characterless Jesus of the Superintendents and
+Konsistorialrats which especially arouses his enmity. With this figure he
+contrasts his own Jesus, the man of holy anger, the man of holy calm, the
+man of holy melancholy, the master of dialectic, the imperious ruler, the
+man of high gifts and practical ability, the man of inexorable consistency
+and reforming vigour.
+
+Jesus was, according to De Jonge, a pupil of Hillel. He demanded voluntary
+poverty only in special cases, not as a general principle. In the case of
+the rich young man, He knew "that the property which he had inherited was
+derived in this particular case from impure sources which must be cut off
+at once and for ever."
+
+But how does De Jonge know that Jesus knew this?
+
+A writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who
+displays in the process, as De Jonge does, not only wit and address, but
+historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology
+with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon
+against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find
+between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical
+knowledge of his own.
+
+De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father:
+"One proof may serve where many might be given--the hasty flight into Egypt
+with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that
+country."
+
+De Jonge knows--he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which
+he everywhere gives the preference--that Jesus was between forty and fifty
+years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement
+in Luke iii. 23, that He was {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~} thirty years old, can only mislead those
+who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that
+"Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful
+appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was."
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from
+obscurity, was a widower and had a little son--the "lad" of John vi. 9, who
+had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and
+many other things the author finds in "the glorious John." According to De
+Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more
+accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an
+expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and
+conning the menu with interest when He dined with "privy-finance-
+councillor" Zacchaeus.
+
+But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!
+
+De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by
+Kirchbach's book, "What did Jesus teach?"(250) but here everything,
+instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to
+have been acquainted with Noack's "History of Jesus," otherwise he would
+hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's
+touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.
+
+The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian
+philosophy. The saying, "No man hath seen God at any time," is to be
+understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the
+"Critique of Pure Reason." Jesus always used the words "death" and "life"
+in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in
+another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God,
+not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of
+Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is
+because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original
+collection of Logia "with extreme literality."
+
+The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is,
+according to Kirchbach, merely "a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives
+expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His
+inborn love of His native land."
+
+The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real
+teaching of Epicurus, "that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics,
+and the resulting condition of blessedness, of _makaria_." The only
+purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him. "If
+the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon
+to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich
+fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge, 'Right gladly. It will
+not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to
+have it, why then I can do without it,' the Rabbi would probably in that
+case not have taken him at his word, but would have said, 'Young man, I
+like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the
+Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me
+by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.' "
+
+Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid
+of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi. "It is not
+the body," he explains, "of the long departed thinker, who apparently
+attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that
+we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense, 'eat'; in the sense which
+He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching,
+His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them
+in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the
+symbol of water."(251)
+
+Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of
+view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the
+modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the work is to retain His
+significance for a metaphysical and non-ascetic time; and since it is not
+possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies
+His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.
+
+It is, in fact, the characteristic feature of the Life-of-Jesus literature
+on the threshold of the new century even in the productions of professedly
+historical and scientific theology, to subordinate the historical interest
+to the interest of the general world-view. And those who "wrest the
+Kingdom of Heaven" are beginning to wrest Jesus Himself along with it. Men
+who have no qualifications for the task, whose ignorance is nothing less
+than criminal, who loftily anathematise scientific theology instead of
+making themselves in some measure acquainted with the researches which it
+has carried out, feel impelled to write a Life of Jesus, in order to set
+forth their general religious view in a portrait of Jesus which has not
+the faintest claim to be historical, and the most far-fetched of these
+find favour, and are eagerly absorbed by the multitude.
+
+It would be something to be thankful for if all these Lives of Jesus were
+based on as definite an idea and as acute historical observation as we
+find in Albert Dulk's "The Error of the Life of Jesus."(252) In Dulk the
+story of the fate of Jesus is also the story of the fate of religion. The
+Galilaean teacher, whose true character was marked by deep religious
+inwardness, was doomed to destruction from the moment when He set Himself
+upon the dizzy heights of the divine sonship and the eschatological
+expectation. He died in despair, having vainly expected, down to the very
+last, a "telegram from heaven." Religion as a whole can only avoid the
+same fate by renouncing all transcendental elements.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably
+small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them,
+one knows them all. They have scarcely altered since Venturini's time,
+except that some of the cures performed by Jesus are handled in the modern
+Lives from the point of view of the recent investigations in hypnotism and
+suggestion.(253)
+
+According to Paul de Regla(254) Jesus was born out of wedlock. Joseph,
+however, gave shelter and protection to the mother. De Regla dwells on the
+beauty of the child. "His eyes were not exceptionally large, but were
+well-opened, and were shaded by long, silky, dark-brown eyelashes, and
+rather deep-set. They were of a blue-grey colour, which changed with
+changing emotions, taking on various shades, especially blue and brownish-
+grey."
+
+He and His disciples were Essenes, as was also the Baptist. That implies
+that He was no longer a Jew in the strict sense. His preaching dealt with
+the rights of man, and put forward socialistic and communistic demands:
+His religion in the pure consciousness of communion with God. With
+eschatology He had nothing whatever to do, it was first interpolated into
+His teaching by Matthew.
+
+The miracles are all to be explained by suggestion and hypnotism. At the
+marriage at Cana, Jesus noticed that the guests were taking too much, and
+therefore secretly bade the servants pour out water instead of wine while
+He Himself said, "Drink, this is better wine." In this way He succeeded in
+suggesting to a part of the company that they were really drinking wine.
+The feeding of the multitude is explained by striking out a couple of
+noughts from the numbers; the raising of Lazarus by supposing it a case of
+premature burial. Jesus Himself when taken down from the cross was not
+dead, and the Essenes succeeded in reanimating Him. His work is inspired
+with hatred against Catholicism, but with a real reverence for Jesus.
+
+Another mere variant of the plan of Venturini is the fictitious Life of
+Jesus of Pierre Nahor.(255) The sentimental descriptions of nature and the
+long dialogues characteristic of the Lives of Jesus of a hundred years ago
+are here again in full force. After John had already begun to preach in
+the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, Jesus, in company with a distinguished
+Brahmin who possessed property at Nazareth and had an influential
+following in Jerusalem, made a journey to Egypt and was there
+indoctrinated into all kinds of Egyptian, Essene, and Indian philosophy,
+thus giving the author, or rather the authoress, an opportunity to develop
+her ideas on the philosophy of religion in didactic dialogues. When He
+soon afterwards begins to work in Galilee the young teacher is much aided
+by the fact that, at the instance of His fellow-traveller, He had acquired
+from Egyptian mendicants a practical acquaintance with the secrets of
+hypnotism. By His skill He healed Mary of Magdala, a distinguished
+courtesan of Tiberias. They had met before at Alexandria. After being
+cured she left Tiberias and went to live in a small house, inherited from
+her mother, at Magdala.
+
+Jesus Himself never went to Tiberias, but the social world of that place
+took an interest in Him, and often had itself rowed to the beach when He
+was preaching. Rich and pious ladies used to inquire of Him where He
+thought of preaching to the people on a given day, and sent baskets of
+bread and dried fish to the spot which He indicated, that the multitude
+might not suffer hunger. This is the explanation of the stories about the
+feeding of the multitudes; the people had no idea whence Jesus suddenly
+obtained the supplies which He caused His disciples to distribute.
+
+When he became aware that the priests had resolved upon His death, He made
+His friend Joseph of Arimathea, a leading man among the Essenes, promise
+that he would take Him down from the cross as soon as possible and lay Him
+in the grave without other witnesses. Only Nicodemus was to be present. On
+the cross He put Himself into a cataleptic trance; He was taken down from
+the cross seemingly dead, and came to Himself again in the grave. After
+appearing several times to His disciples he set out for Nazareth and
+dragged His way painfully thither. With a last effort He reaches the house
+of His mysterious old Indian teacher. At the door He falls helpless, just
+as the morning dawns. The old slave-woman recognises Him and carries Him
+into the house, where He dies. "The serene solemn night withdrew and day
+broke in blinding splendour behind Tiberias."
+
+Nikolas Notowitsch(256) finds in Luke i. 80 ("And the child grew ... and
+was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel") a "gap in
+the life of Jesus," in spite of the fact that this passage refers to the
+Baptist, and proposes to fill it by putting Jesus to school with the
+Brahmins and Buddhists from His thirteenth to His twenty-ninth year. As
+evidence for this he refers to statements about Buddhist worship of a
+certain Issa which he professes to have found in the monasteries of Little
+Thibet. The whole thing is, as was shown by the experts, a barefaced
+swindle and an impudent invention.
+
+                  -------------------------------------
+
+To the fictitious Lives of Jesus belong also in the main the theosophical
+"Lives," which equally play fast and loose with the history, though here
+with a view to proving that Jesus had absorbed the Egyptian and Indian
+theosophy, and had been indoctrinated with "occult science." The
+theosophists, however, have the advantage of escaping the dilemma between
+reanimation after a trance and resurrection, since they are convinced that
+it was possible for Jesus to reassume His body after He had really died.
+But in the touching up and embellishment of the Gospel narratives they
+out-do even the romancers.
+
+Ernest Bosc,(257) writing as a theosophist, makes it the chief aim of his
+work to describe the oriental origin of Christianity, and ventures to
+assert that Jesus was not a Semite, but an Aryan. The Fourth Gospel is, of
+course, the basis of his representation. He does not hesitate, however, to
+appeal also to the anonymous "Revelations" published in 1849, which are a
+mere plagiarism from Venturini.
+
+A work which is written with some ability and with much out-of-the-way
+learning is "Did Jesus live 100 B.C.?"(258) The author compares the
+Christian tradition with the Jewish, and finds in the latter a
+reminiscence of a Jesus who lived in the time of Alexander Jannaeus
+(104-76 B.C.). This person was transferred by the earliest Evangelist to
+the later period, the attempt being facilitated by the fact that during
+the procuratorship of Pilate a false prophet had attracted some attention.
+The author, however, only professes to offer it as a hypothesis, and
+apologises in advance for the offence which it is likely to cause.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX. THOROUGHGOING SCEPTICISM AND THOROUGHGOING ESCHATOLOGY
+
+
+    _W. Wrede._ Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien. Zugleich ein
+    Beitrag zum Verstaendnis des Markusevangeliums. (The Messianic
+    Secret in the Gospels. Forming a contribution also to the
+    understanding of the Gospel of Mark.) Goettingen, 1901. 286 pp.
+
+    _Albert Schweitzer._ Das Messianitaets- und Leidensgeheimnis. Eine
+    Skizze des Lebens Jesu. (The Secret of the Messiahship and the
+    Passion. A Sketch of the Life of Jesus.) Tuebingen and Leipzig,
+    1901. 109 pp.
+
+
+The coincidence between the work of Wrede(259) and the "Sketch of the Life
+of Jesus" is not more surprising in regard to the time of their appearance
+than in regard to the character of their contents. They appeared upon the
+self-same day, their titles are almost identical, and their agreement in
+the criticism of the modern historical conception of the life of Jesus
+extends sometimes to the very phraseology. And yet they are written from
+quite different standpoints, one from the point of view of literary
+criticism, the other from that of the historical recognition of
+eschatology. It seems to be the fate of the Marcan hypothesis that at the
+decisive periods its problems should always be attacked simultaneously and
+independently from the literary and the historical sides, and the results
+declared in two different forms which corroborate each other. So it was in
+the case of Weisse and Wilke; so it is again now, when, retaining the
+assumption of the priority of Mark, the historicity of the hitherto
+accepted view of the life of Jesus, based upon the Marcan narrative, is
+called in question.
+
+The meaning of that is that the literary and the eschatological view,
+which have hitherto been marching parallel, on either flank, to the
+advance of modern theology, have now united their forces, brought theology
+to a halt, surrounded it, and compelled it to give battle.
+
+That in the last three or four years so much has been written in which
+this enveloping movement has been ignored does not alter the real position
+of modern historical theology in the least. The fact is deserving of
+notice that during this period the study of the subject has not made a
+step in advance, but has kept moving to and fro upon the old lines with
+wearisome iteration, and has thrown itself with excessive zeal into the
+work of popularisation, simply because it was incapable of advancing.
+
+And even if it professes gratitude to Wrede for the very interesting
+historical point which he has brought into the discussion, and is also
+willing to admit that thoroughgoing eschatology has advanced the solution
+of many problems, these are mere demonstrations which are quite inadequate
+to raise the blockade of modern theology by the allied forces. Supposing
+that only a half--nay, only a third--of the critical arguments which are
+common to Wrede and the "Sketch of the Life of Jesus" are sound, then the
+modern historical view of the history is wholly ruined.
+
+The reader of Wrede's book cannot help feeling that here no quarter is
+given; and any one who goes carefully through the present writer's
+"Sketch" must come to see that between the modern historical and the
+eschatological Life of Jesus no compromise is possible.
+
+Thoroughgoing scepticism and thoroughgoing eschatology may, in their
+union, either destroy, or be destroyed by modern historical theology; but
+they cannot combine with it and enable it to advance, any more than they
+can be advanced by it.
+
+We are confronted with a decisive issue. As with Strauss's "Life of
+Jesus," so with the surprising agreement in the critical basis of these
+two schools--we are not here considering the respective solutions which
+they offer--there has entered into the domain of the theology of the day a
+force with which it cannot possibly ally itself. Its whole territory is
+threatened. It must either reconquer it step by step or else surrender it.
+It has no longer the right to advance a single assertion until it has
+taken up a definite position in regard to the fundamental questions raised
+by the new criticism.
+
+Modern historical theology is no doubt still far from recognising this. It
+is warned that the dyke is letting in water and sends a couple of masons
+to repair the leak; as if the leak did not mean that the whole masonry is
+undermined, and must be rebuilt from the foundation.
+
+To vary the metaphor, theology comes home to find the broker's marks on
+all the furniture and goes on as before quite comfortably, ignoring the
+fact it will lose everything if it does not pay its debts.
+
+The critical objections which Wrede and the "Sketch" agree in bringing
+against the modern treatment of the subject are as follows.
+
+In order to find in Mark the Life of Jesus of which it is in search,
+modern theology is obliged to read between the lines a whole host of
+things, and those often the most important, and then to foist them upon
+the text by means of psychological conjecture. It is determined to find
+evidence in Mark of a development of Jesus, a development of the
+disciples, and a development of the outer circumstances; and professes in
+so doing to be only reproducing the views and indications of the
+Evangelist. In reality, however, there is not a word of all this in the
+Evangelist, and when his interpreters are asked what are the hints and
+indications on which they base their assertions they have nothing to offer
+save _argumenta e silentio_.
+
+Mark knows nothing of any development in Jesus; he knows nothing of any
+paedagogic considerations which are supposed to have determined the
+conduct of Jesus towards the disciples and the people; he knows nothing of
+any conflict in the mind of Jesus between a spiritual and a popular,
+political Messianic ideal; he does not know, either, that in this respect
+there was any difference between the view of Jesus and that of the people;
+he knows nothing of the idea that the use of the ass at the triumphal
+entry symbolised a non-political Messiahship; he knows nothing of the idea
+that the question about the Messiah's being the Son of David had something
+to do with this alternative between political and non-political; he does
+not know, either, that Jesus explained the secret of the passion to the
+disciples, nor that they had any understanding of it; he only knows that
+from first to last they were in all respects equally wanting in
+understanding; he does not know that the first period was a period of
+success and the second a period of failure; he represents the Pharisees
+and Herodians as (from iii. 6 onwards) resolved upon the death of Jesus,
+while the people, down to the very last day when He preached in the
+temple, are enthusiastically loyal to Him.
+
+All these things of which the Evangelist says nothing--and they are the
+foundations of the modern view--should first be proved, if proved they can
+be; they ought not to be simply read into the text as something self-
+evident. For it is just those things which appear so self-evident to the
+prevailing critical temper which are in reality the least evident of all.
+
+Another hitherto self-evident point--the "historical kernel" which it has
+been customary to extract from the narratives--must be given up, until it
+is proved, if it is capable of proof, that we can and ought to distinguish
+between the kernel and the husk. We may take all that is reported as
+either historical or unhistorical, but, in respect of the definite
+predictions of the passion, death, and resurrection, we ought to give up
+taking the reference to the passion as historical and letting the rest go;
+we may accept the idea of the atoning death, or we may reject it, but we
+ought not to ascribe to Jesus a feeble, anaemic version of this idea,
+while setting down to the account of the Pauline theology the
+interpretation of the passion which we actually find in Mark.
+
+Whatever the results obtained by the aid of the historical kernel, the
+method pursued is the same; "it is detached from its context and
+transformed into something different." "It finally comes to this," says
+Wrede, "that each critic retains whatever portion of the traditional
+sayings can be fitted into his construction of the facts and his
+conception of historical possibility and rejects the rest." The
+psychological explanation of motive, and the psychological connexion of
+the events and actions which such critics have proposed to find in Mark,
+simply do not exist. That being so, nothing is to be made out of his
+account by the application of a priori psychology. A vast quantity of
+treasures of scholarship and erudition, of art and artifice, which the
+Marcan hypothesis has gathered into its storehouse in the two generations
+of its existence to aid it in constructing its life of Jesus has become
+worthless, and can be of no further service to true historical research.
+Theology has been simplified. What would become of it if that did not
+happen every hundred years or so? And the simplification was badly needed,
+for no one since Strauss had cleared away its impedimenta.
+
+Thoroughgoing scepticism and thoroughgoing eschatology, between them, are
+compelling theology to read the Marcan text again with simplicity of mind.
+The simplicity consists in dispensing with the connecting links which it
+has been accustomed to discover between the sections of the narrative
+(_pericopes_), in looking at each one separately, and recognising that it
+is difficult to pass from one to the other.
+
+The material with which it has hitherto been usual to solder the sections
+together into a life of Jesus will not stand the temperature test. Exposed
+to the cold air of critical scepticism it cracks; when the furnace of
+eschatology is heated to a certain point the solderings melt. In both
+cases the sections all fall apart.
+
+Formerly it was possible to book through-tickets at the supplementary-
+psychological-knowledge office which enabled those travelling in the
+interests of Life-of-Jesus construction to use express trains, thus
+avoiding the inconvenience of having to stop at every little station,
+change, and run the risk of missing their connexion. This ticket office is
+now closed. There is a station at the end of each section of the
+narrative, and the connexions are not guaranteed.
+
+The fact is, it is not simply that there is no very obvious psychological
+connexion between the sections; in almost every case there is a positive
+break in the connexion. And there is a great deal in the Marcan narrative
+which is inexplicable and even self-contradictory.
+
+In their statement of the problems raised by this want of connexion Wrede
+and the "Sketch" are in the most exact agreement. That these difficulties
+are not artificially constructed has been shown by our survey of the
+history of the attempts to write the Life of Jesus, in the course of which
+these problems emerge one after another, after Bruno Bauer had by
+anticipation grasped them all in their complexity.
+
+How do the demoniacs know that Jesus is the Son of God? Why does the blind
+man at Jericho address Him as the Son of David, when no one else knows His
+Messianic dignity? How was it that these occurrences did not give a new
+direction to the thoughts of the people in regard to Jesus? How did the
+Messianic entry come about? How was it possible without provoking the
+interference of the Roman garrison of occupation? Why is it as completely
+ignored in the subsequent controversies as if had never taken place? Why
+was it not brought up at the trial of Jesus? "The Messianic acclamation at
+the entry into Jerusalem," says Wrede, "is in Mark quite an isolated
+incident. It has no sequel, neither is there any preparation for it
+beforehand."
+
+Why does Jesus in Mark iv. 10-12 speak of the parabolic form of discourse
+as designed to conceal the mystery of the Kingdom of God, whereas the
+explanation which He proceeds to give to the disciples has nothing
+mysterious about it? What is the mystery of the Kingdom of God? Why does
+Jesus forbid His miracles to be made known even in cases where there is no
+apparent purpose for the prohibition? Why is His Messiahship a secret and
+yet no secret, since it is known, not only to the disciples, but to the
+demoniacs, the blind man at Jericho, the multitude at Jerusalem--which
+must, as Bruno Bauer expresses it, "have fallen from heaven"--and to the
+High Priest?
+
+Why does Jesus first reveal His Messiahship to the disciples at Caesarea
+Philippi, not at the moment when He sends them forth to preach? How does
+Peter know without having been told by Jesus that the Messiahship belongs
+to his Master? Why must it remain a secret until the "resurrection"? Why
+does Jesus indicate His Messiahship only by the title Son of Man? And why
+is it that this title is so far from prominent in primitive Christian
+theology?
+
+What is the meaning of the statement that Jesus at Jerusalem discovered a
+difficulty in the fact that the Messiah was described as at once David's
+son and David's Lord? How are we to explain the fact that Jesus had to
+open the eyes of the people to the greatness of the Baptist's office,
+subsequently to the mission of the Twelve, and to enlighten the disciples
+themselves in regard to it during the descent from the mount of
+transfiguration? Why should this be described in Matt. xi. 14 and 15 as a
+mystery difficult to grasp ("If ye can receive it" ... "He that hath ears
+to hear, let him hear")? What is the meaning of the saying that he that is
+least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than the Baptist? Does the
+Baptist, then, not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven? How is the Kingdom of
+Heaven subjected to violence since the days of the Baptist? Who are the
+violent? What is the Baptist intended to understand from the answer of
+Jesus?
+
+What importance was attached to the miracles by Jesus Himself? What office
+must they have caused the people to attribute to Him? Why is the discourse
+at the sending out of the Twelve filled with predictions of persecutions
+which experience had given no reason to anticipate, and which did not, as
+a matter of fact, occur? What is the meaning of the saying in Matt. x. 23
+about the imminent coming of the Son of Man, seeing that the disciples
+after all returned to Jesus without its being fulfilled? Why does Jesus
+leave the people just when His work among them is most successful, and
+journey northwards? Why had He, immediately after the sending forth of the
+Twelve, manifested a desire to withdraw Himself from the multitude who
+were longing for salvation?
+
+How does the multitude mentioned in Mark viii. 34 suddenly appear at
+Caesarea Philippi? Why is its presence no longer implied in Mark ix. 30?
+How could Jesus possibly have travelled unrecognised through Galilee, and
+how could He have avoided being thronged in Capernaum although He stayed
+at "the house"?
+
+How came He so suddenly to speak to His disciples of His suffering and
+dying and rising again, without, moreover, explaining to them either the
+natural or the moral "wherefore"? "There is no trace of any attempt on the
+part of Jesus," says Wrede, "to break this strange thought gradually to
+His disciples ... the prediction is always flung down before the disciples
+without preparation, it is, in fact, a characteristic feature of these
+sayings that all attempt to aid the understanding of the disciples is
+lacking."
+
+Did Jesus journey to Jerusalem with the purpose of working there, or of
+dying there? How comes it that in Mark x. 39, He holds out to the sons of
+Zebedee the prospect of drinking His cup and being baptized with His
+baptism? And how can He, after speaking so decidedly of the necessity of
+His death, think it possible in Gethsemane that the cup might yet pass
+from Him? Who are the undefined "many," for whom, according to Mark x. 45
+and xiv. 24, His death shall serve as a ransom?(260)
+
+How came it that Jesus alone was arrested? Why were no witnesses called at
+His trial to testify that He had given Himself out to be the Messiah? How
+is it that on the morning after His arrest the temper of the multitude
+seems to be completely changed, so that no one stirs a finger to help Him?
+
+In what form does Jesus conceive the resurrection, which He promises to
+His disciples, to be combined with the coming on the clouds of heaven, to
+which He points His judge? In what relation do these predictions stand to
+the prospect held out at the time of the sending forth of the Twelve, but
+not realized, of the immediate appearance of the Son of Man?
+
+What is the meaning of the further prediction on the way to Gethsemane
+(Mark xiv. 28) that after His resurrection He will go before the disciples
+into Galilee? How is the other version of this saying (Mark xvi. 7) to be
+explained, according to which it means, as spoken by the angel, that the
+disciples are to journey to Galilee to have their first meeting with the
+risen Jesus there, whereas, on the lips of Jesus, it betokened that, just
+as now as a sufferer He was going before them from Galilee to Jerusalem,
+so, after His resurrection, He would go before them from Jerusalem to
+Galilee? And what was to happen there?
+
+These problems were covered up by the naturalistic psychology as by a
+light snow-drift. The snow has melted, and they now stand out from the
+narratives like black points of rock. It is no longer allowable to avoid
+these questions, or to solve them, each by itself, by softening them down
+and giving them an interpretation by which the reported facts acquire a
+quite different significance from that which they bear for the Evangelist.
+Either the Marcan text as it stands is historical, and therefore to be
+retained, or it is not, and then it should be given up. What is really
+unhistorical is any softening down of the wording, and the meaning which
+it naturally bears.
+
+The sceptical and eschatological schools, however, go still farther in
+company. If the connexion in Mark is really no connexion, it is important
+to try to discover whether any principle can be discovered in this want of
+connexion. Can any order be brought into the chaos? To this the answer is
+in the affirmative.
+
+The complete want of connexion, with all its self-contradictions, is
+ultimately due to the fact that two representations of the life of Jesus,
+or, to speak more accurately, of His public ministry, are here crushed
+into one; a natural and a deliberately supernatural representation. A
+dogmatic element has intruded itself into the description of this
+Life--something which has no concern with the events which form the outward
+course of that Life. This dogmatic element is the Messianic secret of
+Jesus and all the secrets and concealments which go along with it.
+
+Hence the irrational and self-contradictory features of the presentation
+of Jesus, out of which a rational psychology can make only something which
+is unhistorical and does violence to the text, since it must necessarily
+get rid of the constant want of connexion and self-contradiction which
+belongs to the essence of the narrative, and portray a Jesus who was the
+Messiah, not one who at once was and was not Messiah, as the Evangelist
+depicts Him. When rational psychology conceives Him as one who was
+Messiah, but not in the sense expected by the people, that is a concession
+to the self-contradictions of the Marcan representation; which, however,
+does justice neither to the text nor to the history which it records,
+since the Gospel does not contain the faintest hint that the contradiction
+was of this nature.
+
+Up to this point--up to the complete reconstruction of the system which
+runs through the disconnectedness, and the tracing back of the dogmatic
+element to the Messianic secret--there extends a close agreement between
+thoroughgoing scepticism and thoroughgoing eschatology. The critical
+arguments are identical, the construction is analogous and based on the
+same principle. The defenders of the modern psychological view cannot,
+therefore, play off one school against the other, as one of them proposed
+to do, but must deal with them both at once. They differ only when they
+explain whence the system that runs through the disconnectedness comes.
+Here the ways divide, as Bauer saw long ago. The inconsistency between the
+public life of Jesus and His Messianic claim lies either in the nature of
+the Jewish Messianic conception, or in the representation of the
+Evangelist. There is, on the one hand, the eschatological solution, which
+at one stroke raises the Marcan account as it stands, with all its
+disconnectedness and inconsistencies, into genuine history; and there is,
+on the other hand, the literary solution, which regards the incongruous
+dogmatic element as interpolated by the earliest Evangelist into the
+tradition and therefore strikes out the Messianic claim altogether from
+the historical Life of Jesus. _Tertium non datur._
+
+But in some respects it really hardly matters which of the two "solutions"
+one adopts. They are both merely wooden towers erected upon the solid main
+building of the consentient critical induction which offers the enigmas
+detailed above to modern historical theology. It is interesting in this
+connexion that Wrede's scepticism is just as constructive as the
+eschatological outline of the Life of Jesus in the "Sketch."
+
+Bruno Bauer chose the literary solution because he thought that we had no
+evidence for an eschatological expectation existing in the time of Christ.
+Wrede, though he follows Johannes Weiss in assuming the existence of a
+Jewish eschatological Messianic expectation, finds in the Gospel only the
+Christian conception of the Messiah. "If Jesus," he thinks, "really knew
+Himself to be the Messiah and designated Himself as such, the genuine
+tradition is so closely interwoven with later accretions that it is not
+easy to recognise it." In any case, Jesus cannot, according to Wrede, have
+spoken of His Messianic Coming in the way which the Synoptists report. The
+Messiahship of Jesus, as we find it in the Gospels, is a product of Early
+Christian theology correcting history according to its own conceptions.
+
+It is therefore necessary to distinguish in Mark between the reported
+events which constitute the outward course of the history of Jesus, and
+the dogmatic idea which claims to lay down the lines of its inward course.
+The principle of division is found in the contradictions.
+
+The recorded events form, according to Wrede, the following picture. Jesus
+came forward as a teacher,(261) first and principally in Galilee. He was
+surrounded by a company of disciples, went about with them, and gave them
+instruction. To some of them He accorded a special confidence. A larger
+multitude sometimes attached itself to Him, in addition to the disciples.
+He is fond of discoursing in parables. Besides the teaching there are the
+miracles. These make a stir, and He is thronged by the multitudes. He
+gives special attention to the cases of demoniacs. He is in such close
+touch with the people that He does not hesitate to associate even with
+publicans and sinners. Towards the Law He takes up an attitude of some
+freedom. He encounters the opposition of the Pharisees and the Jewish
+authorities. They set traps for Him and endeavour to bring about His fall.
+Finally they succeed, when He ventures to show Himself not only on Judaean
+soil, but in Jerusalem. He remains passive and is condemned to death. The
+Roman administration supports the Jewish authorities.
+
+"The texture of the Marcan narrative as we know it," continues Wrede, "is
+not complete until to the warp of these general historical notions there
+is added a strong weft of ideas of a dogmatic character," the substance of
+which is that "Jesus, the bearer of a special office to which He was
+appointed by God," becomes "a higher, superhuman being." If this is the
+case, however, then the motives of His conduct are not derived from human
+characteristics, human aims and necessities. "The one motive which runs
+throughout is rather a Divine decree which lies beyond human
+understanding. This He seeks to fulfil alike in His actions and His
+sufferings. The teaching of Jesus is accordingly supernatural." On this
+assumption the want of understanding of the disciples to whom He
+communicates, without commentary, unconnected portions of this
+supernatural knowledge becomes natural and explicable. The people are,
+moreover, essentially "non-receptive of revelation."
+
+"It is these _motifs_ and not those which are inherently historical which
+give movement and direction to the Marcan narrative. It is they that give
+the general colour. On them naturally depends the main interest, it is to
+them that the thought of the writer is really directed. The consequence is
+that the general picture offered by the Gospel is not an historical
+representation of the Life of Jesus. Only some faded remnants of such an
+impression have been taken over into a supra-historical religious view. In
+this sense the Gospel of Mark belongs to the history of dogma."
+
+The two conceptions of the Life of Jesus, the natural and the
+supernatural, are brought, not without inconsistencies, into a kind of
+harmony by means of the idea of intentional secrecy. The Messiahship of
+Jesus is concealed in His life as in a closed dark lantern, which,
+however, is not quite closed--otherwise one could not see that it was
+there--and allows a few bright beams to escape.
+
+The idea of a secret which must remain a secret until the resurrection of
+Jesus could only arise at a time when nothing was known of a Messianic
+claim of Jesus during His life upon earth: that is to say, at a time when
+the Messiahship of Jesus was thought of as beginning with the
+resurrection. But that is a weighty piece of indirect historical evidence
+that Jesus did not really profess to be the Messiah at all.
+
+The positive fact which is to be inferred from this is that the
+appearances of the risen Jesus produced a sudden revolution in His
+disciples' conception of Him. "The resurrection" is for Wrede the real
+Messianic event in the Life of Jesus.
+
+Who is responsible, then, for introducing this singular feature, so
+destructive of the real historical connexion, into the life of Jesus,
+which was in reality that of a teacher? It is quite impossible, Wrede
+argues, that the idea of the Messianic secret is the invention of Mark. "A
+thing like that is not done by a single individual. It must, therefore,
+have been a view which was current in certain circles, and was held by a
+considerable number, though not necessarily perhaps by a very great number
+of persons. To say this is not to deny that Mark had a share and perhaps a
+considerable share in the creation of the view which he sets forth ... the
+_motifs_ themselves are doubtless not, in part at least, peculiar to the
+Evangelist, but the concrete embodiment of them is certainly his own work;
+and to this extent we may speak of a special Marcan point of view which
+manifests itself here and there. Where the line is to be drawn between
+what is traditional and what is individual cannot always be determined
+even by a careful examination directed to this end. We must leave it
+commingled, as we find it."
+
+The Marcan narrative has therefore arisen from the impulse to give a
+Messianic form to the earthly life of Jesus. This impulse was, however,
+restrained by the impression and tradition of the non-Messianic character
+of the life of Jesus, which were still strong and vivid, and it was
+therefore not able wholly to recast the material, but could only bore its
+way into it and force it apart, as the roots of the bramble disintegrate a
+rock. In the Gospel literature which arose on the basis of Mark the
+Messianic secret becomes gradually of more subordinate importance and the
+life of Jesus more Messianic in character, until in the Fourth Gospel He
+openly comes before the people with Messianic claims.
+
+In estimating the value of this construction we must not attach too much
+importance to its a priori assumptions and difficulties. In this respect
+Wrede's position is much more precarious than that of his precursor Bruno
+Bauer. According to the latter the interpolation of the Messianic secret
+is the personal, absolutely original act of the Evangelist. Wrede thinks
+of it as a collective act, representing the new conception as moulded by
+the tradition before it was fixed by the Evangelist. That is very much
+more difficult to carry through. Tradition alters its materials in a
+different way from that in which we find them altered in Mark. Tradition
+transforms from without. Mark's way of drawing secret threads of a
+different material through the texture of the tradition, without otherwise
+altering it, is purely literary, and could only be the work of an
+individual person.
+
+A creative tradition would have carried out the theory of the Messianic
+secret in the life of Jesus much more boldly and logically, that is to
+say, at once more arbitrarily and more consistently.
+
+The only alternative is to distinguish two stages of tradition in early
+Christianity, a naive, freely-working, earlier stage, and a more
+artificial later stage confined to a smaller circle of a more literary
+character. Wrede does, as a matter of fact, propose to find in Mark traces
+of a simpler and bolder transformation which, leaving aside the Messianic
+secret, makes Jesus an openly-professed Messiah, and is therefore of a
+distinct origin from the conception of the secret Christ. To this
+tradition may belong, he thinks, the entry into Jerusalem and the
+confession before the High Priest, since these narratives "naively" imply
+an openly avowed Messiahship.
+
+The word "naively" is out of place here; a really naive tradition which
+intended to represent the entry of Jesus as Messianic would have done so
+in quite a different way from Mark, and would not have stultified itself
+so curiously as we find done even in Matthew, where the Galilaean Passover
+pilgrims, after the "Messianic entry," answer the question of the people
+of Jerusalem as to who it was whom they were acclaiming, with the words
+"This is the Prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee" (Matt. xxi. 11).
+
+The tradition, too, which makes Jesus acknowledge His Messiahship before
+His judges is not "naive" in Wrede's sense, for, if it were, it would not
+represent the High Priest's knowledge of Jesus' Messiahship as something
+so extraordinary and peculiar to himself that he can cite witnesses only
+for the saying about the Temple, not with reference to Jesus' Messianic
+claim, and bases his condemnation only on the fact that Jesus in answer to
+his question acknowledges Himself as Messiah--and Jesus does so, it should
+be remarked, as in other passages, with an appeal to a future
+justification of His claim. The confession before the council is therefore
+anything but a "naive representation of an openly avowed Messiahship."
+
+The Messianic statements in these two passages present precisely the same
+remarkable character as in all the other cases to which Wrede draws
+attention. We have not here to do with a different tradition, with a clear
+Messianic light streaming in through the window-pane, but, just as
+elsewhere, with the rays of a dark lantern. The real point is that Wrede
+cannot bring these two passages within the lines of the theory of secrecy,
+and practically admits this by assuming the existence of a second and
+rather divergent line of tradition. What concerns us is to note that this
+theory does not suffice to explain the two facts in question, the
+knowledge of Jesus' Messiahship shown by the Galilaean Passover pilgrims
+at the time of the entry into Jerusalem, and the knowledge of the High
+Priest at His trial.
+
+We can only touch on the question whether any one who wished to date back
+in some way or other the Messiahship into the life of Jesus could not have
+done it much more simply by making Jesus give His closest followers some
+hints regarding it. Why does the re-moulder of the history, instead of
+doing that, have recourse to a supernatural knowledge on the part of the
+demoniacs and the disciples? For Wrede rightly remarks, as Bruno Bauer and
+the "Sketch" also do, that the incident of Caesarea Philippi, as
+represented by Mark, involves a miracle, since Jesus does not, as is
+generally supposed, reveal His Messiahship to Peter; it is Peter who
+reveals it to Jesus (Mark viii. 29). This fact, however, makes nonsense of
+the whole theory about the disciples' want of understanding. It will not
+therefore fit into the concealment theory, and Wrede, as a matter of fact,
+feels obliged to give up that theory as regards this incident. "This
+scene," he remarks, "can hardly have been created by Mark himself." It
+also, therefore, belongs to another tradition.
+
+Here, then, is a third Messianic fact which cannot be brought within the
+lines of Wrede's "literary" theory of the Messianic secret. And these
+three facts are precisely the most important of all: Peter's confession,
+the Entry into Jerusalem, and the High Priest's knowledge of Jesus'
+Messiahship! In each case Wrede finds himself obliged to refer these to
+tradition instead of to the literary conception of Mark.(262) This
+tradition undermines his literary hypothesis, for the conception of a
+tradition always involves the possibility of genuine historical elements.
+
+How greatly this inescapable intrusion of tradition weakens the theory of
+the literary interpolation of the Messiahship into the history, becomes
+evident when we consider the story of the passion. The representation that
+Jesus was publicly put to death as Messiah because He had publicly
+acknowledged Himself to be so, must, like the High Priest's knowledge of
+His claim, be referred to the other tradition which has nothing to do with
+the Messianic secret, but boldly antedates the Messiahship without
+employing any finesse of that kind. But that strongly tends to confirm the
+historicity of this tradition, and throws the burden of proof upon those
+who deny it. It is wholly independent of the hypothesis of secrecy, and in
+fact directly opposed to it. If, on the other hand, in spite of all the
+difficulties, the representation that Jesus was condemned to death on
+account of His Messianic claims is dragged by main force into the theory
+of secrecy, the question arises: What interest had the persons who set up
+the literary theory of secrecy, in representing Jesus as having been
+openly put to death as Messiah and in consequence of His Messianic claims?
+And the answer is: "None whatever: quite the contrary." For in doing so
+the theory of secrecy stultifies itself. As though one were to develop a
+photographic plate with painful care and, just when one had finished,
+fling open the shutters, so, on this hypothesis, the natural Messianic
+light suddenly shines into the room which ought to be lighted only by the
+rays of the dark lantern.
+
+Here, therefore, the theory of secrecy abandoned the method which it had
+hitherto followed in regard to the traditional material. For if Jesus was
+not condemned and crucified at Jerusalem as Messiah, a tradition must have
+existed which preserved the truth about the last conflicts, and the
+motives of the condemnation. This is supposed to have been here completely
+set aside by the theory of the secret Messiahship, which, instead of
+drawing its delicate threads through the older tradition, has simply
+substituted its own representation of events. But in that case why not do
+away with the remainder of the public ministry? Why not at least get rid
+of the public appearance at Jerusalem? How can the crudeness of method
+shown in the case of the passion be harmonised with the skilful
+conservatism towards the non-Messianic tradition which it is obvious that
+the "Marcan circle" has scrupulously observed elsewhere?
+
+If according to the original tradition, of which Wrede admits the
+existence, Jesus went to Jerusalem not to die, but to work there, the
+dogmatic view, according to which He went to Jerusalem to die, must have
+struck out the whole account of His sojourn in Jerusalem and His death, in
+order to put something else in its place. What we now read in the Gospels
+concerning those last days in Jerusalem cannot be derived from the
+original tradition, for one who came to work, and, according to Wrede, "to
+work with decisive effect," would not have cast all His preaching into the
+form of obscure parables of judgment and minatory discourses. That is a
+style of speech which could be adopted only by one who was determined to
+force his adversaries to put him to death. Therefore the narrative of the
+last days of Jesus must be, from beginning to end, a creation of the
+dogmatic idea. And, as a matter of fact, Wrede, here in agreement with
+Weisse, "sees grounds for asserting that the sojourn at Jerusalem is
+presented to us in the Gospels in a very much abridged and weakened
+version." That is a euphemistic expression, for if it was really the
+dogmatic idea which was responsible for representing Jesus as being
+condemned as Messiah, it is not a mere case of "abridging and weakening
+down," but of displacing the tradition in favour of a new one.
+
+But if Jesus was not condemned as Messiah, on what grounds was He
+condemned? And, again, what interest had those whose concern was to make
+the Messiahship a secret of His earthly life, in making Him die as
+Messiah, contrary to the received tradition? And what interest could the
+tradition have had in falsifying history in that way? Even admitting that
+the prediction of the passion to the disciples is of a dogmatic character,
+and is to be regarded as a creation of primitive Christian theology, the
+historic fact that He died would have been a sufficient fulfilment of
+those sayings. That He was publicly condemned and crucified as Messiah has
+nothing to do with the fulfilment of those predictions, and goes far
+beyond it.
+
+To take a more general point: what interest had primitive theology in
+dating back the Messiahship of Jesus to the time of His earthly ministry?
+None whatever. Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly
+life of Jesus was regarded by primitive Christianity. The discourses in
+Acts show an equal indifference, since in them also Jesus first becomes
+the Messiah by virtue of His exaltation. To date the Messiahship earlier
+was not an undertaking which offered any advantage to primitive theology,
+in fact it would only have raised difficulties for it, since it involved
+the hypothesis of a dual Messiahship, one of earthly humiliation and one
+of future glory. The fact is, if one reads through the early literature
+one becomes aware that so long as theology had an eschatological
+orientation and was dominated by the expectation of the Parousia the
+question of how Jesus of Nazareth "had been" the Messiah not only did not
+exist, but was impossible. Primitive theology is simply a theology of the
+future, with no interest in history! It was only with the decline of
+eschatological interest and the change in the orientation of Christianity
+which was connected therewith that an interest in the life of Jesus and
+the "historical Messiahship" arose.
+
+That is to say, the Gnostics, who were the first to assert the Messiahship
+of the historical Jesus, and who were obliged to assert it precisely
+because they denied the eschatological conceptions, forced this view upon
+the theology of the Early Church, and compelled it to create in the Logos
+Christology an un-Gnostic mould in which to cast the speculative
+conception of the historical Messiahship of Jesus; and that is what we
+find in the Fourth Gospel. Prior to the anti-Gnostic controversies we find
+in the early Christian literature no conscious dating back of the
+Messiahship of Jesus to His earthly life, and no theological interest at
+work upon the dogmatic recasting of His history.(263) It is therefore
+difficult to suppose that the Messianic secret in Mark, that is to say, in
+the very earliest tradition, was derived from primitive theology. The
+assertion of the Messiahship of Jesus was wholly independent of the
+latter. The instinct which led Bruno Bauer to explain the Messianic secret
+as the literary invention of Mark himself was therefore quite correct.
+Once suppose that tradition and primitive theology have anything to do
+with the matter, and the theory of the interpolation of the Messiahship
+into the history becomes almost impossible to carry through. But Wrede's
+greatness consists precisely in the fact that he was compelled by his
+acute perception of the significance of the critical data to set aside the
+purely literary version of the hypothesis and make Mark, so to speak, the
+instrument of the literary realisation of the ideas of a definite
+intellectual circle within the sphere of primitive theology.
+
+The positive difficulty which confronts the sceptical theory is to explain
+how the Messianic beliefs of the first generation arose, if Jesus,
+throughout His life, was for all, even for the disciples, merely a
+"teacher," and gave even His intimates no hint of the dignity which He
+claimed for Himself. It is difficult to eliminate the Messiahship from the
+"Life of Jesus," especially from the narrative of the passion; it is more
+difficult still, as Keim saw long ago, to bring it back again after its
+elimination from the "Life" into the theology of the primitive Church. In
+Wrede's acute and logical thinking this difficulty seems to leap to light.
+
+Since the Messianic secret in Mark is always connected with the
+resurrection, the date at which the Messianic belief of the disciples
+arose must be the resurrection of Jesus. "But the idea of dating the
+Messiahship from the resurrection is certainly not a thought of Jesus, but
+of the primitive Church. It presupposes the Church's experience of the
+appearance of the risen Jesus."
+
+The psychologist will say that the "resurrection experiences," however
+they may be conceived, are only intelligible as based upon the expectation
+of the resurrection, and this again as based on references of Jesus to the
+resurrection. But leaving psychology aside, let us accept the resurrection
+experiences of the disciples as a pure psychological miracle. Even so, how
+can the appearances of the risen Jesus have suggested to the disciples the
+idea that Jesus, the crucified teacher, was the Messiah? Apart from any
+expectations, how can this conclusion have resulted for them from the mere
+"fact of the resurrection"? The fact of the appearance did not by any
+means imply it. In certain circles, indeed, according to Mark vi. 14-16,
+in the very highest quarters, the resurrection of the Baptist was believed
+in; but that did not make John the Baptist the Messiah. The inexplicable
+thing is that, according to Wrede, the disciples began at once to assert
+confidently and unanimously that He was the Messiah and would before long
+appear in glory.
+
+But how did the appearance of the risen Jesus suddenly become for them a
+proof of His Messiahship and the basis of their eschatology? That Wrede
+fails to explain, and so makes this "event" an "historical" miracle which
+in reality is harder to believe than the supernatural event.
+
+Any one who holds "historical" miracles to be just as impossible as any
+other kind, even when they occur in a critical and sceptical work, will be
+forced to the conclusion that the Messianic eschatological significance
+attached to the "resurrection experience" by the disciples implies some
+kind of Messianic eschatological references on the part of the historical
+Jesus which gave to the "resurrection" its Messianic eschatological
+significance. Here Wrede himself, though without admitting it, postulates
+some Messianic hints on the part of Jesus, since he conceives the judgment
+of the disciples upon the resurrection to have been not analytical, but
+synthetic, inasmuch as they add something to it, and that, indeed, the
+main thing, which was not implied in the conception of the event as such.
+
+Here again the merit of Wrede's contribution to criticism consists in the
+fact that he takes the position as it is and does not try to improve it
+artificially. Bruno Bauer and others supposed that the belief in the
+Messiahship of Jesus had slowly solidified out of a kind of gaseous state,
+or had been forced into primitive theology by the literary invention of
+Mark. Wrede, however, feels himself obliged to base it upon an historical
+fact, and, moreover, the same historical fact which is pointed to by the
+sayings in the Synoptics and the Pauline theology. But in so doing he
+creates an almost insurmountable difficulty for his hypothesis.
+
+We can only briefly refer to the question what form the accounts of the
+resurrection must have taken if the historic fact which underlay them was
+the first surprised apprehension and recognition of the Messiahship of
+Jesus on the part of the disciples. The Messianic teaching would
+necessarily in that case have been somehow or other put into the mouth of
+the risen Jesus. It is, however, completely absent, because it was already
+contained in the teaching of Jesus during His earthly life. The theory of
+Messianic secrecy must therefore have re-moulded not merely the story of
+the passion, but also that of the resurrection, removing the revelation of
+the Messiahship to the disciples from the latter in order to insert it
+into the public ministry!
+
+Wrede, moreover, will only take account of the Marcan text as it stands,
+not of the historical possibility that the "futuristic Messiahship" which
+meets us in the mysterious utterances of Jesus goes back in some form to a
+sound tradition. Further he does not take the eschatological character of
+the teaching of Jesus into his calculations, but works on the false
+assumption that he can analyse the Marcan text in and by itself and so
+discover the principle on which it is composed. He carries out experiments
+on the law of crystallisation of the narrative material in this Gospel,
+but instead of doing so in the natural and historical atmosphere he does
+it in an atmosphere artificially neutralised, which contains no trace of
+contemporary conceptions.(264) Consequently the conclusion based on the
+sum of his observations has in it something arbitrary. Everything which
+conflicts with the rational construction of the course of the history is
+referred directly to the theory of the concealment of the Messianic
+secret. But in the carrying out of that theory a number of self-
+contradictions, without which it could not subsist, must be recognised and
+noted.
+
+Thus, for example, all the prohibitions,(265) whatever they may refer to,
+even including the command not to make known His miracles, are referred to
+the same category as the injunction not to reveal the Messianic secret.
+But what justification is there for that? It presupposes that according to
+Mark the miracles could be taken as proofs of the Messiahship, an idea of
+which there is no hint whatever in Mark. "The miracles," Wrede argues,
+"are certainly used by the earliest Christians as evidence of the nature
+and significance of Christ.... I need hardly point to the fact that Mark,
+not less than Matthew, Luke, and John, must have held the opinion that the
+miracles of Jesus encountered a widespread and ardent Messianic
+expectation."
+
+In John this Messianic significance of the miracles is certainly assumed;
+but then the really eschatological view of things has here fallen into the
+background. It seems indeed as if genuine eschatology excluded the
+Messianic interpretation of the miracles. In Matthew the miracles of Jesus
+have nothing whatever to do with the proof of the Messiahship, but, as is
+evident from the saying about Chorazin and Bethsaida, Matt. xi. 20-24, are
+only an exhibition of mercy intended to awaken repentance, or, according
+to Matt. xii. 28, an indication of the nearness of the Kingdom of God.
+They have as little to do with the Messianic office as in the Acts of the
+Apostles.(266) In Mark, from first to last, there is not a single syllable
+to suggest that the miracles have a Messianic significance. Even admitting
+the possibility that the "miracles of Jesus encountered an ardent
+Messianic expectation," that does not necessarily imply a Messianic
+significance in them. To justify that conclusion requires the pre-
+supposition that the Messiah was expected to be some kind of an earthly
+man who should do miracles. This is presupposed by Wrede, by Bruno Bauer,
+and by modern theology in general, but it has not been proved, and it is
+at variance with eschatology, which pictured the Messiah to itself as a
+heavenly being in a world which was already being transformed into
+something supra-mundane.
+
+The assumption that the clue to the explanation of the command not to make
+known the miracles is to be found in the necessity of guarding the secret
+of the Messiahship is, therefore, not justified. The miracles are
+connected with the Kingdom and the nearness of the Kingdom, not with the
+Messiah. But Wrede is obliged to refer everything to the Messianic secret,
+because he leaves the preaching of the Kingdom out of account.
+
+The same process is repeated in the discussion of the veiling of the
+mystery of the Kingdom of God in the parables of Mark iv. The mystery of
+the Kingdom is for Wrede the secret of Jesus' Messiahship. "We have
+learned in the meantime," he says, "that one main element in this mystery
+is that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. If Jesus, according to Mark,
+conceals his Messiahship, we are justified in interpreting the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}
+{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} in the light of this fact."
+
+That is one of the weakest points in Wrede's whole theory. Where is there
+any hint of this in these parables? And why should the secret of the
+Kingdom of God contain within it as one of its principal features the
+secret of the Messiahship of Jesus?
+
+"Mark's account of Jesus' parabolic teaching," he concludes, "is
+completely unhistorical," because it is directly opposed to the essential
+nature of the parables. The ultimate reason, according to Wrede, why this
+whole view of the parables arose, was simply "because the general opinion
+was already in existence that Jesus had revealed Himself to the disciples,
+but concealed Himself from the multitude."
+
+Instead of simply admitting that we are unable to discover what the
+mystery of the Kingdom in Mark iv. is, any more than we can understand why
+it must be veiled, and numbering it among the unsolved problems of Jesus'
+preaching of the Kingdom, Wrede forces this chapter inside the lines of
+his theory of the veiled Messiahship.
+
+The desire of Jesus to be alone, too, and remain unrecognised (Mark vii.
+24 and ix. 30 ff.) is supposed to have some kind of connexion with the
+veiling of the Messiahship. He even brings the multitude, which in Mark x.
+47 ff. rebukes the blind beggar at Jericho who cried out to Jesus, into
+the service of his theory ... on the ground that the beggar had addressed
+Him as Son of David. But all the narrative says is that they told him to
+hold his peace--to cease making an outcry--not that they did so because of
+his addressing Jesus as "Son of David."
+
+In an equally arbitrary fashion the surprising introduction of the
+"multitude" in Mark viii. 34, after the incident of Caesarea Philippi, is
+dragged into the theory of secrecy.(267) Wrede does not feel the
+possibility or impossibility of the sudden appearance of the multitude in
+this locality as an historical problem, any more than he grasps the sudden
+withdrawal of Jesus from His public ministry as primarily an historical
+question. Mark is for him a writer who is to be judged from a pathological
+point of view, a writer who, dominated by the fixed idea of introducing
+everywhere the Messianic secret of Jesus, is always creating mysterious
+and unintelligible situations, even when these do not directly serve the
+interests of his theory, and who in some of his descriptions, writes in a
+rather "fairy-tale" style. When all is said, his treatment of the history
+scarcely differs from that of the fourth Evangelist.
+
+The absence of historical prepossessions which Wrede skilfully assumes in
+his examination of the connexion in Mark is not really complete. He is
+bound to refer everything inexplicable to the principle of the concealment
+of the Messiahship, which is the only principle that he recognises in the
+dogmatic stratum of the narrative, and is consequently obliged to deny the
+historicity of such passages, whereas in reality the veiling of the
+Messiahship is only involved in a few places and is there indicated in
+clear and simple words. He is unwilling to recognise that there is a
+second, wider circle of mystery which has to do, not with Jesus'
+Messiahship, but with His preaching of the Kingdom, with the mystery of
+the Kingdom of God in the wider sense, and that within this second circle
+there lie a number of historical problems, above all the mission of the
+Twelve and the inexplicable abandonment of public activity on the part of
+Jesus which followed soon afterwards. His mistake consists in endeavouring
+by violent methods to subsume the more general, the mystery of the Kingdom
+of God, under the more special, the mystery of the Messiahship, instead of
+inserting the latter as the smaller circle, within the wider, the secret
+of the Kingdom of God.
+
+As he does not deal with the teaching of Jesus, he has no occasion to take
+account of the secret of the Kingdom of God. That is the more remarkable
+because corresponding to one fundamental idea of the Messianic secret
+there is a parallel, more general dogmatic conception in Jesus' preaching
+of the Kingdom. For if Jesus in Matt. x. gives the disciples nothing to
+take with them on their mission but predictions of suffering; if at the
+very beginning of His ministry He closes the Beatitudes with a blessing
+upon the persecuted; if in Mark viii. 34 ff. He warns the people that they
+will have to choose between life and life, between death and death; if, in
+short, from the first, He loses no opportunity of preaching about
+suffering and following Him in His sufferings; that is just as much a
+matter of dogma as His own sufferings and predictions of sufferings. For
+in both cases the necessity of suffering, the necessity of facing death,
+is not "a necessity of the historical situation," not a necessity which
+arises out of the circumstances; it is an assertion put forth without
+empirical basis, a prophecy of storm while the sky is blue, since neither
+Jesus nor the people to whom He spoke were undergoing any persecution; and
+when His fate overtook Him not even the disciples were involved in it. It
+is distinctly remarkable that, except for a few meagre references, the
+enigmatic character of Jesus' constant predictions of suffering has not
+been discussed in the Life-of-Jesus literature.(268)
+
+What has now to be done, therefore, is, in contradistinction to Wrede, to
+make a critical examination of the dogmatic element in the life of Jesus
+on the assumption that the atmosphere of the time was saturated with
+eschatology, that is, to keep in even closer touch with the facts than
+Wrede does, and moreover, to proceed, not from the particular to the
+general, but from the general to the particular, carefully considering
+whether the dogmatic element is not precisely the historical element. For,
+after all, why should not Jesus think in terms of doctrine, and make
+history in action, just as well as a poor Evangelist can do it on paper,
+under the pressure of the theological interests of the primitive
+community.
+
+Once again, however, we must repeat that the critical analysis and the
+assertion of a system running through the disorder are the same in the
+eschatological as in the sceptical hypothesis, only that in the
+eschatological analysis a number of problems come more clearly to light.
+The two constructions are related like the bones and cartilage of the
+body. The general structure is the same, only that in the case of the one
+a solid substance, lime, is distributed even in the minutest portions,
+giving it firmness and solidity, while in the other case this is lacking.
+This reinforcing substance is the eschatological world-view.
+
+How is it to be explained that Wrede, in spite of the eschatological
+school, in spite of Johannes Weiss, could, in critically investigating the
+connecting principle of the life of Jesus, simply leave eschatology out of
+account? The blame rests with the eschatological school itself, for it
+applied the eschatological explanation only to the preaching of Jesus, and
+not even to the whole of this, but only to the Messianic secret, instead
+of using it also to throw light upon the whole public work of Jesus, the
+connexion and want of connexion between the events. It represented Jesus
+as thinking and speaking eschatologically in some of the most important
+passages of His teaching, but for the rest gave as uneschatological a
+presentation of His life as modern historical theology had done. The
+teaching of Jesus and the history of Jesus were set in different keys.
+Instead of destroying the modern-historical scheme of the life of Jesus,
+or subjecting it to a rigorous examination, and thereby undertaking the
+performance of a highly valuable service to criticism, the eschatological
+theory confined itself within the limits of New Testament Theology, and
+left it to Wrede to reveal one after another by a laborious purely
+critical method the difficulties which from its point of view it might
+have grasped historically at a single glance. It inevitably follows that
+Wrede is unjust to Johannes Weiss and Johannes Weiss towards Wrede.(269)
+
+It is quite inexplicable that the eschatological school, with its clear
+perception of the eschatological element in the preaching of the Kingdom
+of God, did not also hit upon the thought of the "dogmatic" element in the
+history of Jesus. Eschatology is simply "dogmatic history"--history as
+moulded by theological beliefs--which breaks in upon the natural course of
+history and abrogates. it. Is it not even a priori the only conceivable
+view that the conduct of one who looked forward to His Messianic
+"Parousia" in the near future should be determined, not by the natural
+course of events, but by that expectation? The chaotic confusion of the
+narratives ought to have suggested the thought that the events had been
+thrown into this confusion by the volcanic force of an incalculable
+personality, not by some kind of carelessness or freak of the tradition.
+
+A very little consideration suffices to show that there is something quite
+incomprehensible in the public ministry of Jesus taken as a whole.
+According to Mark it lasted less than a year, for since he speaks of only
+one Passover-journey we may conclude that no other Passover fell within
+the period of Jesus' activity as a teacher. If it is proposed to assume
+that He allowed a Passover to go by without going up to Jerusalem, His
+adversaries, who took Him to task about hand-washings and about rubbing
+the ears of corn on the Sabbath, would certainly have made a most serious
+matter of this, and we should have to suppose that the Evangelist for some
+reason or other thought fit to suppress the fact. That is to say, the
+burden of proof lies upon those who assert a longer duration for the
+ministry of Jesus.
+
+Until they have succeeded in proving it, we may assume something like the
+following course of events. Jesus, in going up to a Passover, came in
+contact with the movement initiated by John the Baptist in Judaea, and,
+after the lapse of a little time--if we bring into the reckoning the forty
+days' sojourn in the wilderness mentioned in Mark i. 13, a few weeks
+later--appeared in Galilee proclaiming the near approach of the Kingdom of
+God. According to Mark He had known Himself since His baptism to be the
+Messiah, but from the historical point of view that does not matter, since
+history is concerned with the first announcement of the Messiahship, not
+with inward psychological processes.(270)
+
+This work of preaching the Kingdom was continued until the sending forth
+of the Twelve; that is to say, at the most for a few weeks. Perhaps in the
+saying "the harvest is great but the labourers are few," with which Jesus
+closes His work prior to sending forth the disciples, there lies an
+allusion to the actual state of the natural fields. The flocking of the
+people to Him after the Mission of the Twelve, when a great multitude
+thronged about Him for several days during His journey along the northern
+shore of the lake, can be more naturally explained if the harvest had just
+been brought in.
+
+However that may be, it is certain that Jesus, in the midst of His initial
+success, left Galilee, journeyed northwards, and only resumed His work as
+a teacher in Judaea on the way to Jerusalem! Of His "public ministry,"
+therefore, a large section falls out, being cancelled by a period of
+inexplicable concealment; it dwindles to a few weeks of preaching here and
+there in Galilee and the few days of His sojourn in Jerusalem.(271)
+
+But in that case the public life of Jesus becomes practically
+unintelligible. The explanation that His cause in Galilee was lost, and
+that He was obliged to flee, has not the slightest foundation in the
+text.(272) That was recognised even by Keim, the inventor of the
+successful and unsuccessful periods in the life of Jesus, as is shown by
+his suggestion that the Evangelists had intentionally removed the traces
+of failure from the decisive period which led up to the northern journey.
+The controversy over the washing of hands in Mark vii. 1-23, to which
+appeal is always made, is really a defeat for the Pharisees. The theory of
+the "desertion of the Galilaeans," which appears with more or less
+artistic variations in all modern Lives of Jesus, owes its existence not
+to any other confirmatory fact, but simply to the circumstance that Mark
+makes the simple statement: "And Jesus departed and went into the region
+of Tyre" (vii. 24) without offering any explanation of this decision.
+
+The only conclusion which the text warrants is that Mark mentioned no
+reason because he knew of none. The decision of Jesus did not rest upon
+the recorded facts, since it ignores these, but upon considerations lying
+outside the history. His life at this period was dominated by a "dogmatic
+idea" which rendered Him indifferent to all else ... even to the happy and
+successful work as a teacher which was opening before Him. How could Jesus
+the "teacher" abandon at that moment a people so anxious to learn and so
+eager for salvation? His action suggests a doubt whether He really felt
+Himself to be a "teacher." If all the controversial discourses and sayings
+and answers to questions, which were so to speak wrung from Him, were
+subtracted from the sum of His utterances, how much of the didactic
+preaching of Jesus would be left over?
+
+But even the supposed didactic preaching is not really that of a
+"teacher," since the purpose of His parables was, according to Mark iv.
+10-12, not to reveal, but to conceal, and of the Kingdom of God He spoke
+only in parables (Mark iv. 34).
+
+Perhaps, however, we are not justified in extending the theory of
+concealment, simply because it is mentioned in connexion with the first
+parable, to all the parables which He ever spoke, for it is never
+mentioned again. It could hardly indeed be applied to the parables with a
+moral, like that, for instance, of the pearl of great price. It is equally
+inapplicable to the parables of coming judgment uttered at Jerusalem, in
+which He explicitly exhorts the people to be prepared and watchful in view
+of the coming of judgment and of the Kingdom. But here too it is deserving
+of notice that Jesus, whenever He desires to make known anything further
+concerning the Kingdom of God than just its near approach, seems to be
+confined, as it were by a higher law, to the parabolic form of discourse.
+It is as though, for reasons which we cannot grasp, His teaching lay under
+certain limitations. It appears as a kind of accessory aspect of His
+vocation. Thus it was possible for Him to give up His work as a teacher
+even at the moment when it promised the greatest success.
+
+Accordingly the fact of His always speaking in parables and of His taking
+this inexplicable resolution both point back to a mysterious pre-
+supposition which greatly reduces the importance of Jesus' work as a
+teacher.
+
+One reason for this limitation is distinctly stated in Mark iv. 10-12,
+viz. predestination! Jesus knows that the truth which He offers is
+exclusively for those who have been definitely chosen, that the general
+and public announcement of His message could only thwart the plans of God,
+since the chosen are already winning their salvation from God. Only the
+phrase, "Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand" and its variants belong
+to the public preaching. And this, therefore, is the only message which He
+commits to His disciples when sending them forth. What this repentance,
+supplementary to the law, the special ethic of the interval before the
+coming of the Kingdom (_Interimsethik_) is, in its positive acceptation,
+He explains in the Sermon on the Mount. But all that goes beyond that
+simple phrase must be publicly presented only in parables, in order that
+those only, who are shown to possess predestination by having the initial
+knowledge which enables them to understand the parables, may receive a
+more advanced knowledge, which is imparted to them in a measure
+corresponding to their original degree of knowledge: "Unto him that hath
+shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that
+which he hath" (Mark iv. 24-25).
+
+The predestinarian view goes along with the eschatology. It is pushed to
+its utmost consequences in the closing incident of the parable of the
+marriage of the King's son (Matt. xxii. 1-14) where the man who, in
+response to a publicly issued invitation, sits down at the table of the
+King, but is recognised from his appearance as not called, is thrown out
+into perdition. "Many are called but few are chosen." The ethical idea of
+salvation and the predestinarian limitation of acceptance to the elect are
+constantly in conflict in the mind of Jesus. In one case, however, He
+finds relief in the thought of predestination. When the rich young man
+turned away, not having strength to give up his possessions for the sake
+of following Jesus as he had been commanded to do, Jesus and His disciples
+were forced to draw the conclusion that he, like other rich men, was lost,
+and could not enter into the Kingdom of God. But immediately afterwards
+Jesus makes the suggestion, "With men it is impossible, but not with God,
+for with God all things are possible" (Mark x. 17-27). That is, He will
+not give up the hope that the young man, in spite of appearances, which
+are against him, will be found to have belonged to the Kingdom of God,
+solely in virtue of the secret all-powerful will of God. Of a "conversion"
+of the young man there is no question.
+
+In the Beatitudes, on the other hand, the argument is reversed; the
+predestination is inferred from its outward manifestation. It may seem to
+us inconceivable, but they are really predestinarian in form. Blessed are
+the poor in spirit! Blessed are the meek! Blessed are the
+peacemakers!--that does not mean that by virtue of their being poor in
+spirit, meek, peace-loving, they deserve the Kingdom. Jesus does not
+intend the saying as an injunction or exhortation, but as a simple
+statement of fact: in their being poor in spirit, in their meekness, in
+their love of peace, it is made manifest that they are predestined to the
+Kingdom. By the possession of these qualities they are marked as belonging
+to it. In the case of others (Matt. v. 10-12) the predestination to the
+Kingdom is made manifest by the persecutions which befall them in this
+world. These are the light of the world, which already shines among men
+for the glory of God (Matt. v. 14-15).
+
+The kingdom cannot be "earned"; what happens is that men are called to it,
+and show themselves to be called to it. On careful examination it appears
+that the idea of reward in the sayings of Jesus is not really an idea of
+reward, because it is relieved against a background of predestination. For
+the present it is sufficient to note the fact that the eschatologico-
+predestinarian view brings a mysterious element of dogma not merely into
+the teaching, but also into the public ministry of Jesus.
+
+To take another point, what is the mystery of the Kingdom of God? It must
+consist of something more than merely its near approach, and something of
+extreme importance; otherwise Jesus would be here indulging in mere
+mystery-mongering. The saying about the candle which He puts upon the
+stand, in order that what was hidden may be revealed to those who have
+ears to hear, implies that He is making a tremendous revelation to those
+who understand the parables about the growth of the seed. The mystery must
+therefore contain the explanation why the Kingdom must now come, and how
+men are to know how near it is. For the general fact that it is very near
+had already been openly proclaimed both by the Baptist and by Jesus. The
+mystery, therefore, must consist of something more than that.
+
+In these parables it is not the idea of development, but of the apparent
+absence of causation which occupies the foremost place. The description
+aims at suggesting the question, how, and by what power, incomparably
+great and glorious results can be infallibly produced by an insignificant
+fact without human aid. A man sowed seed. Much of it was lost, but the
+little that fell into good ground brought forth a harvest--thirty, sixty,
+an hundredfold--which left no trace of the loss in the sowing. How did that
+come about?
+
+A man sows seed and does not trouble any further about it--cannot indeed do
+anything to help it, but he knows that after a definite time the glorious
+harvest which arises out of the seed will stand before him. By what power
+is that effected?
+
+An extremely minute grain of mustard seed is planted in the earth and
+there necessarily arises out of it a great bush, which cannot certainly
+have been contained in the grain of seed. How was that?
+
+What the parables emphasise is, therefore, so to speak, the in itself
+negative, inadequate, character of the initial fact, upon which, as by a
+miracle, there follows in the appointed time, through the power of God,
+some great thing. They lay stress not upon the natural, but upon the
+miraculous character of such occurrences.
+
+But what is the initial fact of the parables? It is the sowing.
+
+It is not said that by the man who sows the seed Jesus means Himself. The
+man has no importance. In the parable of the mustard seed he is not even
+mentioned. All that is asserted is that the initial fact is already
+present, as certainly present as the time of the sowing is past at the
+moment when Jesus speaks. That being so, the Kingdom of God must follow as
+certainly as harvest follows seed-sowing. As a man believes in the
+harvest, without being able to explain it, simply because the seed has
+been sown; so with the same absolute confidence he may believe in the
+Kingdom of God.
+
+And the initial fact which is symbolised? Jesus can only mean a fact which
+was actually in existence--the movement of repentance evoked by the Baptist
+and now intensified by His own preaching. That necessarily involves the
+bringing in of the Kingdom by the power of God; as man's sowing
+necessitates the giving of the harvest by the same Infinite Power. Any one
+who knows this sees with different eyes the corn growing in the fields and
+the harvest ripening, for he sees the one fact in the other, and awaits
+along with the earthly harvest the heavenly, the revelation of the Kingdom
+of God.
+
+If we look into the thought more closely we see that the coming of the
+Kingdom of God is not only symbolically or analogically, but also really
+and temporally connected with the harvest. The harvest ripening upon earth
+is the last! With it comes also the Kingdom of God which brings in the new
+age. When the reapers are sent into the fields, the Lord in Heaven will
+cause His harvest to be reaped by the holy angels.
+
+If the three parables of Mark iv. contain the mystery of the Kingdom of
+God, and are therefore capable of being summed up in a single formula,
+this can be nothing else than the joyful exhortation: "Ye who have eyes to
+see, read, in the harvest which is ripening upon earth, what is being
+prepared in heaven!" The eager eschatological hope was to regard the
+natural process as the last of its kind, and to see in it a special
+significance in view of the event of which it was to give the signal.
+
+The analogical and temporal parallelism becomes complete if we assume that
+the movement initiated by the Baptist began in the spring, and notice that
+Jesus, according to Matt. ix. 37 and 38, before sending out the disciples
+to make a speedy proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God,
+uttered the remarkable saying about the rich harvest. It seems like a
+final expression of the thought contained in the parables about the seed
+and its promise, and finds its most natural explanation in the supposition
+that the harvest was actually at hand.
+
+Whatever may be thought of this attempt to divine historically the secret
+of the Kingdom of God, there is one thing that cannot be got away from,
+viz. that the initial fact to which Jesus points, under the figure of the
+sowing, is somehow or other connected with the eschatological preaching of
+repentance, which had been begun by the Baptist.
+
+That may be the more confidently asserted because Jesus in another
+mysterious saying describes the days of the Baptist as a time which makes
+preparation for the coming of the Kingdom of God. "From the days of John
+the Baptist," He says in Matt. xi. 12, "even until now, the Kingdom of
+Heaven is subjected to violence, and the violent wrest it to themselves."
+The saying has nothing to do with the entering of individuals into the
+Kingdom; it simply asserts, that since the coming of the Baptist a certain
+number of persons are engaged in forcing on and compelling the coming of
+the Kingdom. Jesus' expectation of the Kingdom is an expectation based
+upon a fact which exercises an active influence upon the Kingdom of God.
+It was not He, and not the Baptist who "were working at the coming of the
+Kingdom"; it is the host of penitents which is wringing it from God, so
+that it may now come at any moment.
+
+The eschatological insight of Johannes Weiss made an end of the modern
+view that Jesus founded the Kingdom. It did away with all activity, as
+exercised upon the Kingdom of God, and made the part of Jesus purely a
+waiting one. Now the activity comes back into the preaching of the
+Kingdom, but this time eschatologically conditioned. The secret of the
+Kingdom of God which Jesus unveils in the parables about confident
+expectation in Mark iv., and declares in so many words in the eulogy on
+the Baptist (Matt. xi.), amounts to this, that in the movement to which
+the Baptist gave the first impulse, and which still continued, there was
+an initial fact which was drawing after it the coming of the Kingdom, in a
+fashion which was miraculous, unintelligible, but unfailingly certain,
+since the sufficient cause for it lay in the power and purpose of God.
+
+It should be observed that Jesus in these parables, as well as in the
+related saying at the sending forth of the Twelve, uses the formula, "He
+that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Mark iv. 23 and Matt. xi. 15),
+thereby signifying that in this utterance there lies concealed a
+supernatural knowledge concerning the plans of God, which only those who
+have ears to hear--that is, the foreordained--can detect. For others these
+sayings are unintelligible.
+
+If this genuinely "historical" interpretation of the mystery of the
+Kingdom of God is correct, Jesus must have expected the coming of the
+Kingdom at harvest time. And that is just what He did expect. It is for
+that reason that He sends out His disciples to make known in Israel, as
+speedily as may be, what is about to happen. That in this He is actuated
+by a dogmatic idea, becomes clear when we notice that, according to Mark,
+the mission of the Twelve followed immediately on the rejection at
+Nazareth. The unreceptiveness of the Nazarenes had made no impression upon
+Him; He was only astonished at their unbelief (Mark vi. 6). This passage
+is often interpreted to mean that He was astonished to find His miracle-
+working power fail Him. There is no hint of that in the text. What He is
+astonished at is, that in His native town there were so few believers,
+that is, elect, knowing as He does that the Kingdom of God may appear at
+any moment. But that fact makes no difference whatever to the nearness of
+the coming of the Kingdom.
+
+The Evangelist, therefore, places the rejection at Nazareth and the
+mission of the Twelve side by side, simply because he found them in this
+temporal connexion in the tradition. If he had been working by
+"association of ideas," he would not have arrived at this order. The want
+of connexion, the impossibility of applying any natural explanation, is
+just what is historical, because the course of the history was determined,
+not by outward events, but by the decisions of Jesus, and these were
+determined by dogmatic, eschatological considerations.
+
+To how great an extent this was the case in regard to the mission of the
+Twelve is clearly seen from the "charge" which Jesus gave them. He tells
+them in plain words (Matt. x. 23), that He does not expect to see them
+back in the present age. The Parousia of the Son of Man, which is
+logically and temporally identical with the dawn of the Kingdom, will take
+place before they shall have completed a hasty journey through the cities
+of Israel to announce it. That the words mean this and nothing else, that
+they ought not to be in any way weakened down, should be sufficiently
+evident. This is the form in which Jesus reveals to them the secret of the
+Kingdom of God. A few days later, He utters the saying about the violent
+who, since the days of John the Baptist, are forcing on the coming of the
+Kingdom.
+
+It is equally clear, and here the dogmatic considerations which guided the
+resolutions of Jesus become still more prominent, that this prediction was
+not fulfilled. The disciples returned to Him; and the appearing of the Son
+of Man had not taken place. The actual history disavowed the dogmatic
+history on which the action of Jesus had been based. An event of
+supernatural history which must take place, and must take place at that
+particular point of time, failed to come about. That was for Jesus, who
+lived wholly in the dogmatic history, the first "historical" occurrence,
+the central event which closed the former period of His activity and gave
+the coming period a new character. To this extent modern theology is
+justified when it distinguishes two periods in the Life of Jesus; an
+earlier, in which He is surrounded by the people, a later in which He is
+"deserted" by them, and travels about with the Twelve only. It is a sound
+observation that the two periods are sharply distinguished by the attitude
+of Jesus. To explain this difference of attitude, which they thought
+themselves bound to account for on natural historical grounds, theologians
+of the modern historical school invented the theory of growing opposition
+and waning support. Weisse, no doubt, had expressed himself in direct
+opposition to this theory.(273) Keim, who gave it its place in theology,
+was aware that in setting it up he was going against the plain sense of
+the texts. Later writers lost this consciousness, just as in the first and
+third Gospel the significance of the Messianic secret in Mark gradually
+faded away; they imagined that they could find the basis of fact for the
+theory in the texts, and did not realise that they only believed in the
+desertion of the multitude and the "flights and retirements" of Jesus
+because they could not otherwise explain historically the alteration in
+His conduct, His withdrawal from public work, and His resolve to die.
+
+The thoroughgoing eschatological school makes better work of it. They
+recognise in the non-occurrence of the Parousia promised in Matt. x. 23,
+the "historic fact," in the estimation of Jesus, which in some way
+determined the alteration in His plans, and His attitude towards the
+multitude.
+
+The whole history of "Christianity" down to the present day, that is to
+say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia,
+the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the
+progress and completion of the "de-eschatologising" of religion which has
+been connected therewith. It should be noted that the non-fulfilment of
+Matt. x. 23 is the first postponement of the Parousia. We have therefore
+here the first significant date in the "history of Christianity"; it gives
+to the work of Jesus a new direction, otherwise inexplicable.
+
+Here we recognise also why the Marcan hypothesis, in constructing its view
+of the Life of Jesus, found itself obliged to have recourse more and more
+to the help of modern psychology, and thus necessarily became more and
+more unhistorical. The fact which alone makes possible an understanding of
+the whole, is lacking in this Gospel. Without Matt. x. and xi. everything
+remains enigmatic. For this reason Bruno Bauer and Wrede are in their own
+way the only consistent representatives of the Marcan hypothesis from the
+point of view of historical criticism, when they arrive at the result that
+the Marcan account is inherently unintelligible. Keim, with his strong
+sense of historical reality, rightly felt that the plan of the Life of
+Jesus should not be constructed exclusively on the basis of Mark.
+
+The recognition that Mark alone gives an inadequate basis, is more
+important than any "Ur-Markus" theories, for which it is impossible to
+discover a literary foundation, or find an historical use. A simple
+induction from the "facts" takes us beyond Mark. In the discourse-material
+of Matthew, which the modern-historical school thought they could sift in
+here and there, wherever there seemed to be room for it, there lie hidden
+certain facts--facts which never happened but are all the more important
+for that.
+
+Why Mark describes the events and discourses in the neighbourhood of the
+mission of the Twelve with such careful authentication is a literary
+question which the historical study of the life of Jesus may leave open;
+the more so since, even as a literary question, it is insoluble.
+
+The prediction of the Parousia of the Son of Man is not the only one which
+remained unfulfilled. There is the prediction of sufferings which is
+connected with it. To put it more accurately, the prediction of the
+appearing of the Son of Man in Matt. x. 23 runs up into a prediction of
+sufferings, which, working up to a climax, forms the remainder of the
+discourse at the sending forth of the disciples. This prediction of
+sufferings has as little to do with objective history as the prediction of
+the Parousia. Consequently, none of the Lives of Jesus, which follow the
+lines of a natural psychology, from Weisse down to Oskar Holtzmann, can
+make anything of it.(274) They either strike it out, or transfer it to the
+last "gloomy epoch" of the life of Jesus, regard it as an unintelligible
+anticipation, or put it down to the account of "primitive theology," which
+serves as a scrap-heap for everything for which they cannot find a place
+in the "historical life of Jesus."
+
+In the texts it is quite evident that Jesus is not speaking of sufferings
+after His death, but of sufferings which will befall them as soon as they
+have gone forth from Him. The death of Jesus is not here pre-supposed, but
+only the Parousia of the Son of Man, and it is implied that this will
+occur just after these sufferings and bring them to a close. If the
+theology of the primitive Church had remoulded the tradition, as is always
+being asserted, it would have made Jesus give His followers directions for
+their conduct after His death. That we do not find anything of this kind
+is the best proof that there can be no question of a remoulding of the
+Life of Jesus by primitive theology. How easy it would have been for the
+Early Church to scatter here and there through the discourses of Jesus
+directions which were only to be applied after His death! But the simple
+fact is that it did not do so.
+
+The sufferings of which the prospect is held out at the sending forth are
+doubly, trebly, nay four times over, unhistorical. In the first place--and
+this is the only point which modern historical theology has
+noticed--because there is not a shadow of a suggestion in the outward
+circumstances of anything which could form a natural occasion for such
+predictions of, and exhortations relating to, sufferings. In the second
+place--and this has been overlooked by modern theology because it had
+already declared them to be unhistorical in its own characteristic
+fashion, viz. by striking them out--because they were not fulfilled. In the
+third place--and this has not entered into the mind of modern theology at
+all--because these sayings were spoken in the closest connexion with the
+promise of the Parousia and are placed in the closest connexion with that
+event. In the fourth place, because the description of that which is to
+befall the disciples is quite without any basis in experience. A time of
+general dissension will begin, in which brothers will rise up against
+brothers, and fathers against sons and children against their parents to
+cause them to be put to death (Matt. x. 21). And the disciples "shall be
+hated of all men for His name's sake." Let them strive to hold out to the
+"end," that is, to the coming of the Son of Man, in order that they may be
+saved (Matt. x. 22).
+
+But why should they suddenly be hated and persecuted for the name of
+Jesus, seeing that this name played no part whatever in their preaching?
+That is simply inconceivable. The relation of Jesus to the Son of Man, the
+fact, that is to say, that it is He who is to be manifested as Son of Man,
+must therefore in some way or other become known in the interval; not,
+however, through the disciples, but by some other means of revelation. A
+kind of supernatural illumination will suddenly make known all that Jesus
+has been keeping secret regarding the Kingdom of God and His position in
+the Kingdom. This illumination will arise as suddenly and without
+preparation as the spirit of strife.
+
+And as a matter of fact Jesus predicts to the disciples in the same
+discourse that to their own surprise a supernatural wisdom will suddenly
+speak from their lips, so that it will be not they but the Spirit of God
+who will answer the great ones of the earth. As the Spirit is for Jesus
+and early Christian theology something concrete which is to descend upon
+the elect among mankind only in consequence of a definite event--the
+outpouring of the Spirit which, according to the prophecy of Joel, should
+precede the day of judgment--Jesus must have anticipated that this would
+occur during the absence of the disciples, in the midst of the time of
+strife and confusion.
+
+To put it differently; the whole of the discourse at the sending forth of
+the Twelve, taken in the clear sense of the words, is a prediction of the
+events of the "time of the end," events which are immediately at hand, in
+which the supernatural eschatological course of history will break through
+into the natural course. The expectation of sufferings is therefore
+doctrinal and unhistorical, as is, precisely in the same way, the
+expectation of the pouring forth of the Spirit uttered at the same time.
+The Parousia of the Son of Man is to be preceded according to the
+Messianic dogma by a time of strife and confusion--as it were, the birth-
+throes of the Messiah--and the outpouring of the Spirit. It should be
+noticed that according to Joel iii. and iv. the outpouring of the Spirit,
+along with the miraculous signs, forms the prelude to the judgment; and
+also, that in the same context, Joel iii. 13, the judgment is described as
+the harvest-day of God.(275) Here we have a remarkable parallel to the
+saying about the harvest in Matt. ix. 38, which forms the introduction to
+the discourse at the sending forth of the disciples.
+
+There is only one point in which the predicted course of eschatological
+events is incomplete: the appearance of Elias is not mentioned.
+
+Jesus could not prophesy to the disciples the Parousia of the Son of Man
+without pointing them, at the same time, to the pre-eschatological events
+which must first occur. He must open to them a part of the secret of the
+Kingdom of God, viz. the nearness of the harvest, that they might not be
+taken by surprise and caused to doubt by these events.
+
+Thus this discourse is historical as a whole and down to the smallest
+detail precisely because, according to the view of modern theology, it
+must be judged unhistorical. It is, in fact, full of eschatological dogma.
+Jesus had no need to instruct the disciples as to what they were to teach;
+for they had only to utter a cry. But concerning the events which should
+supervene, it was necessary that He should give them information.
+Therefore the discourse does not consist of instruction, but of
+predictions of sufferings and of the Parousia.
+
+That being so, we may judge with what right the modern psychological
+theology dismisses the great Matthaean discourses off-hand as mere
+"composite structures." Just let any one try to show how the Evangelist
+when he was racking his brains over the task of making a "discourse at the
+sending forth of the disciples," half by the method of piecing it together
+out of traditional sayings and "primitive theology," and half by inventing
+it, lighted on the curious idea of making Jesus speak entirely of
+inopportune and unpractical matters; and of then going on to provide the
+evidence that they never happened.
+
+The foretelling of the sufferings that belong to the eschatological
+distress is part and parcel of the preaching of the approach of the
+Kingdom of God, it embodies the secret of the Kingdom. It is for that
+reason that the thought of suffering appears at the end of the Beatitudes
+and in the closing petition of the Lord's Prayer. For the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} which
+is there in view is not an individual psychological temptation, but the
+general eschatological time of tribulation, from which God is besought to
+exempt those who pray so earnestly for the coming of the Kingdom, and not
+to expose them to that tribulation by way of putting them to the test.
+
+There followed neither the sufferings, nor the outpouring of the Spirit,
+nor the Parousia of the Son of Man. The disciples returned safe and sound
+and full of a proud satisfaction; for one promise had been realised--the
+power which had been given them over the demons.
+
+But from the moment when they rejoined Him, all His thoughts and efforts
+were devoted to getting rid of the people in order to be alone with them
+(Mark vi. 30-33). Previously, during their absence, He had, almost in open
+speech, taught the multitude concerning the Baptist, concerning that which
+was to precede the coming of the Kingdom, and concerning the judgment
+which should come upon the impenitent, even upon whole towns of them
+(Matt. xi. 20-24), because, in spite of the miracles which they had
+witnessed, they had not recognised the day of grace and diligently used it
+for repentance. At the same time He had rejoiced before them over all
+those whom God had enlightened that they might see what was going forward;
+and had called them to His side (Matt. xi. 25-30).
+
+And now suddenly, the moment the disciples return, His one thought is to
+get away from the people. They, however, follow Him and overtake Him on
+the shores of the lake. He puts the Jordan between Himself and them by
+crossing to Bethsaida. They also come to Bethsaida. He returns to
+Capernaum. They do the same. Since in Galilee it is impossible for Him to
+be alone, and He absolutely must be alone, He "slips away" to the north.
+Once more modern theology was right: He really does flee; not, however,
+from hostile Scribes, but from the people, who dog His footsteps in order
+to await in His company the appearing of the Kingdom of God and of the Son
+of Man--to await it in vain.(276)
+
+In Strauss's first Life of Jesus the question is thrown out whether, in
+view of Matt. x. 23, Jesus did not think of His Parousia as a
+transformation which should take place during His lifetime. Ghillany bases
+his work on this possibility as on an established historical fact. Dalman
+takes this hypothesis to be the necessary correlative of the
+interpretation of the self-designation Son of Man on the basis of Daniel
+and the Apocalypses.
+
+If Jesus, he argues, designated Himself in this futuristic sense as the
+Son of Man who comes from Heaven, He must have assumed that He would first
+be transported thither. "A man who had died or been rapt away from the
+earth might perhaps be brought into the world again in this way, or one
+who had never been on earth might so descend thither." But as this
+conception of transformation and removal seems to Dalman untenable in the
+case of Jesus, he treats it as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
+eschatological interpretation of the title.
+
+But why? If Jesus as a man walking in a natural body upon earth, predicts
+to His disciples the Parousia of the Son of Man in the immediate future,
+with the secret conviction that He Himself was to be revealed as the Son
+of Man, He must have made precisely this assumption that He would first be
+supernaturally removed and transformed. He thought of Himself as any one
+must who believes in the immediate coming of the last things, as living in
+two different conditions: the present, and the future condition into which
+He is to be transferred at the coming of the new supernatural world. We
+learn later that the disciples on the way up to Jerusalem were entirely
+possessed by the thought of what they should be when this transformation
+took place. They contend as to who shall have the highest position (Mark
+ix. 33); James and John wish Jesus to promise them in advance the thrones
+on His right hand and on His left (Mark x. 35-37).
+
+He, moreover, does not rebuke them for indulging such thoughts, but only
+tells them how much, in the present age, of service, humiliation, and
+suffering is necessary to constitute a claim to such places in the future
+age, and that it does not in the last resort belong to Him to allot the
+places on His left and on His right, but that they shall be given to those
+for whom they are prepared; therefore, perhaps not to any of the disciples
+(Mark x. 40). At this point, therefore, the knowledge and will of Jesus
+are thwarted and limited by the predestinarianism which is bound up with
+eschatology.
+
+It is quite mistaken, however, to speak as modern theology does, of the
+"service" here required as belonging to the "new ethic of the Kingdom of
+God." There is for Jesus no ethic of the Kingdom of God, for in the
+Kingdom of God all natural relationships, even, for example, the
+distinction of sex (Mark xii. 25 and 26), are abolished. Temptation and
+sin no longer exist. All is "reign," a "reign" which has gradations--Jesus
+speaks of the "least in the Kingdom of God"--according as it has been
+determined in each individual case from all eternity, and according as
+each by his self-humiliation and refusal to rule in the present age has
+proved his fitness for bearing rule in the future Kingdom.
+
+For the loftier stations, however, it is necessary to have proved oneself
+in persecution and suffering. Accordingly, Jesus asks the sons of Zebedee
+whether, since they claim these thrones on His right hand and on His left,
+they feel themselves strong enough to drink of His cup and be baptized
+with His baptism (Mark x. 38). To serve, to humble oneself, to incur
+persecution and death, belong to "the ethic of the interim" just as much
+as does penitence. They are indeed only a higher form of penitence.
+
+A vivid eschatological expectation is therefore impossible to conceive
+apart from the idea of a metamorphosis. The resurrection is only a special
+case of this metamorphosis, the form in which the new condition of things
+is realised in the case of those who are already dead. The resurrection,
+the metamorphosis, and the Parousia of the Son of Man take place
+simultaneously, and are one and the same act.(277) It is therefore quite
+indifferent whether a man loses his life shortly before the Parousia in
+order to "find his life," if that is what is ordained for him; that
+signifies only that he will undergo the eschatological metamorphosis with
+the dead instead of with the living.
+
+The Pauline eschatology recognises both conceptions side by side, in such
+a way, however, that the resurrection is subordinated to the
+metamorphosis. "Behold, I shew you a mystery," he says in 1 Cor. xv. 51
+ff.; "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in
+the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound,
+and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."
+
+The apostle himself desires to be one of those who live to experience the
+metamorphosis and to be clothed with the heavenly mode of existence (2
+Cor. v. 1 ff.). The metamorphosis, however, and the resurrection are, for
+those who are "in Christ," connected with a being caught up into the
+clouds of heaven (1 Thess. iv. 15 ff.). Therefore Paul also makes one and
+the same event of the metamorphosis, resurrection, and translation.
+
+In seeking clues to the eschatology of Jesus, scholars have passed over
+the eschatology which lies closest to it, that of Paul. But why? Is it not
+identical with that of Jesus, at least in so far that both are "Jewish
+eschatology"? Did not Reimarus long ago declare that the eschatology of
+the primitive Christian community was identical with the Jewish, and only
+went beyond it in claiming a definite knowledge on a single point which
+was unessential to the nature and course of the expected events, in
+knowing, that is, who the Son of Man should be? That Christians drew no
+distinction between their own eschatology and the Jewish is evident from
+the whole character of the earlier apocalyptic literature, and not least
+from the Apocalypse of John! After all, what alteration did the belief
+that Jesus was the Son of Man who was to be revealed make in the general
+scheme of the course of apocalyptic events?
+
+From the Rabbinic literature little help is to be derived towards the
+understanding of the world of thought in which Jesus lived, and His view
+of His own Person. The latest researches may be said to have made that
+clear. A few moral maxims, a few halting parables--that is all that can be
+produced in the way of parallels. Even the conception which is there
+suggested of the hidden coming and work of the Messiah is of little
+importance. We find the same ideas in the mouth of Trypho in Justin's
+dialogue, and that makes their Jewish character doubtful. That Jesus of
+Nazareth knew Himself to be the Son of Man who was to be revealed is for
+us the great fact of His self-consciousness, which is not to be further
+explained, whether there had been any kind of preparation for it in
+contemporary theology or not.
+
+The self-consciousness of Jesus cannot in fact be illustrated or
+explained; all that can be explained is the eschatological view, in which
+the Man who possessed that self-consciousness saw reflected in advance the
+coming events, both those of a more general character, and those which
+especially related to Himself.(278)
+
+The eschatology of Jesus can therefore only be interpreted by the aid of
+the curiously intermittent Jewish apocalyptic literature of the period
+between Daniel and the Bar-Cochba rising. What else, indeed, are the
+Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline letters, the Christian apocalypses than
+products of Jewish apocalyptic, belonging, moreover, to its greatest and
+most flourishing period? Historically regarded, the Baptist, Jesus, and
+Paul are simply the culminating manifestations of Jewish apocalyptic
+thought. The usual representation is the exact converse of the truth.
+Writers describe Jewish eschatology in order to illustrate the ideas of
+Jesus. But what is this "Jewish eschatology" after all? It is an
+eschatology with a great gap in it, because the culminating period, with
+the documents which relate to it, has been left out. The true historian
+will describe the eschatology of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul in
+order to explain Jewish eschatology. It is nothing less than a misfortune
+for the science of New Testament Theology that no real attempt has
+hitherto been made to write the history of Jewish eschatology as it really
+was; that is, with the inclusion of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of
+Paul.(279)
+
+All this has had to be said in order to justify the apparently self-
+evident assertion that Mark, Matthew, and Paul are the best sources for
+the Jewish eschatology of the time of Jesus. They represent a phase, which
+even in detail is self-explanatory, of that Jewish apocalyptic hope which
+manifested itself from time to time. We are, therefore, justified in first
+reconstructing the Jewish apocalyptic of the time independently out of
+these documents, that is to say, in bringing the details of the discourses
+of Jesus into an eschatological system, and then on the basis of this
+system endeavouring to explain the apparently disconnected events in the
+history of His public life.
+
+The lines of connection which run backwards towards the Psalms of Solomon,
+Enoch, and Daniel, and forwards towards the apocalypses of Baruch and
+Enoch, are extremely important for the understanding of certain general
+conceptions. On the other hand, it is impossible to over-emphasise the
+uniqueness of the point of view from which the eschatology of the time of
+the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul presents itself to us.
+
+In the first place, men feel themselves so close to the coming events that
+they only see what lies nearest to them, the imaginative development of
+detail entirely ceases. In the second place, it appears to us as though
+seen, so to speak, from within, passed through the medium of powerful
+minds like those of the Baptist and Jesus. That is why it is so great and
+simple. On the other hand, a certain complication arises from the fact
+that it now intersects actual history. All these are original features of
+it, which are not found in the Jewish apocalyptic writings of the
+preceding and following periods, and that is why these documents give us
+so little help in regard to the characteristic detail of the eschatology
+of Jesus and His contemporaries.
+
+A further point to be noticed is that the eschatology of the time of Jesus
+shows the influence of the eschatology of the ancient prophets in a way
+which is not paralleled either before or after. Compare the Synoptic
+eschatology with that of the Psalms of Solomon. In place of the legal
+righteousness, which, since the return from the exile, had formed the link
+of connexion between the present and the future, we find the prophetic
+ethic, the demand for a general repentance, even in the case of the
+Baptist. In the Apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra we see, especially in the
+theological character of the latter, the persistent traces of this ethical
+deepening of apocalyptic.
+
+But even in individual conceptions the apocalyptic of the Baptist, and of
+the period which he introduces, reaches back to the eschatology of the
+prophetic writings. The pouring forth of the spirit, and the figure of
+Elias, who comes again to earth, play a great role in it. The difficulty
+is, indeed, consciously felt of combining the two eschatologies, and
+bringing the prophetic within the Danielic. How, it is asked, can the Son
+of David be at the same time the Danielic Son-of-Man Messiah, at once
+David's son and David's Lord?
+
+It is inadequate to speak of a synthesis of the two eschatologies. What
+has happened is nothing less than the remoulding, the elevation, of the
+Daniel-Enoch apocalyptic by the spirit and conceptions belonging to the
+ancient prophetic hope.
+
+A great simplification and deepening of eschatology begins to show itself
+even in the Psalms of Solomon. The conception of righteousness which the
+writer applies is, in spite of its legal aspect, of an ethical, prophetic
+character. It is an eschatology associated with great historical events,
+the eschatology of a Pharisaism which is fighting for a cause, and has
+therefore a certain inward greatness.(280) Between the Psalms of Solomon
+and the appearance of the Baptist there lies the decadence of Pharisaism.
+At this point there suddenly appears an eschatological movement detached
+from Pharisaism, which was declining into an external legalism, a movement
+resting on a basis of its own, and thoroughly penetrated with the spirit
+of the ancient prophets.
+
+The ultimate _differentia_ of this eschatology is that it was not, like
+the other apocalyptic movements, called into existence by historical
+events. The Apocalypse of Daniel was called forth by the religious
+oppression of Antiochus;(281) the Psalms of Solomon by the civil strife at
+Jerusalem and the first appearance of the Roman power under Pompey;(282)
+Fourth Ezra and Baruch by the destruction of Jerusalem.(283) The
+apocalyptic movement in the time of Jesus is not connected with any
+historical event. It cannot be said, as Bruno Bauer rightly perceived,
+that we know anything about the Messianic expectations of the Jewish
+people at that time.(284) On the contrary, the indifference shown by the
+Roman administration towards the movement proves that the Romans knew
+nothing of a condition of great and general Messianic excitement among the
+Jewish people. The conduct of the Pharisaic party also, and the
+indifference of the great mass of the people, show that there can have
+been no question at that time of a national movement. What is really
+remarkable about this wave of apocalyptic enthusiasm is the fact that it
+was called forth not by external events, but solely by the appearance of
+two great personalities, and subsides with their disappearance, without
+leaving among the people generally any trace, except a feeling of hatred
+towards the new sect.
+
+The Baptist and Jesus are not, therefore, borne upon the current of a
+general eschatological movement. The period offers no events calculated to
+give an impulse to eschatological enthusiasm. They themselves set the
+times in motion by acting, by creating eschatological facts. It is this
+mighty creative force which constitutes the difficulty in grasping
+historically the eschatology of Jesus and the Baptist. Instead of literary
+artifice speaking out of a distant imaginary past, there now enter into
+the field of eschatology men, living, acting men. It was the only time
+when that ever happened in Jewish eschatology.
+
+There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: "Repent, for
+the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the
+knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the
+world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all
+ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself
+upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the
+eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward,
+and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong
+enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend
+history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and
+His reign.
+
+These considerations regarding the distinctive character of the Synoptic
+eschatology were necessary in order to explain the significance of the
+sending forth of the disciples and the discourse which Jesus uttered upon
+that occasion. Jesus' purpose is to set in motion the eschatological
+development of history, to let loose the final woes, the confusion and
+strife, from which shall issue the Parousia, and so to introduce the
+supra-mundane phase of the eschatological drama. That is His task, for
+which He has authority here below. That is why He says in the same
+discourse, "Think not that I am come to send peace on the earth; I am not
+come to send peace, but a sword" (Matt. x. 34).
+
+It was with a view to this initial movement that He chose His disciples.
+They are not His helpers in the work of teaching; we never see them in
+that capacity, and He did not prepare them to carry on that work after His
+death. The very fact that He chooses just twelve shows that it is a
+dogmatic idea which He has in mind. He chooses them as those who are
+destined to hurl the firebrand into the world, and are afterwards, as
+those who have been the comrades of the unrecognised Messiah, before He
+came to His Kingdom, to be His associates in ruling and judging it.(285)
+
+But what was to be the fate of the future Son of Man during the Messianic
+woes of the last times? It appears as if it was appointed for Him to share
+the persecution and the suffering. He says that those who shall be saved
+must take their cross and follow Him (Matt. x. 38), that His followers
+must be willing to lose their lives for His sake, and that only those who
+in this time of terror confess their allegiance to Him, shall be confessed
+by Him before His heavenly Father (Matt. x. 32). Similarly, in the last of
+the Beatitudes, He had pronounced those blessed who were despised and
+persecuted for His sake (Matt. v. 11, 12). As the future bearer of the
+supreme rule He must go through the deepest humiliation. There is danger
+that His followers may doubt Him. Therefore, the last words of His message
+to the Baptist, just at the time when He had sent forth the Twelve, is,
+"Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me" (Matt. xi. 6).
+
+If He makes a point of familiarising others with the thought that in the
+time of tribulation they may even lose their lives, He must have
+recognised that this possibility was still more strongly present in His
+own case. It is possible that in the enigmatic saying about the disciples
+fasting "when the bridegroom is taken away from them" (Mark ii. 20), there
+is a hint of what Jesus expected. In that case suffering, death, and
+resurrection must have been closely united in the Messianic consciousness
+from the first. So much, however, is certain, viz. that the thought of
+suffering formed part, at the time of the sending forth the disciples, of
+the mystery of the Kingdom of God and of the Messiahship of Jesus, and
+that in the form that Jesus and all the elect were to be brought low in
+the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} at the time of the death-struggle against the evil world-
+power which would arise against them; brought down, it might be, even to
+death. It mattered as little in His own case as in that of others whether
+at the time of the Parousia He should be one of those who should be
+metamorphosed, or one who had died and risen again. The question arises,
+however, how this self-consciousness of Jesus could remain concealed. It
+is true the miracles had nothing to do with the Messiahship, since no one
+expected the Messiah to come as an earthly miracle-worker in the present
+age. On the contrary, it would have been the greatest of miracles if any
+one had recognised the Messiah in an earthly miracle-worker. How far the
+cries of the demoniacs who addressed Him as Messiah were intelligible by
+the people must remain an open question. What is clear is that His
+Messiahship did not become known in this way even to His disciples.
+
+And yet in all His speech and action the Messianic consciousness shines
+forth. One might, indeed, speak of the acts of His Messianic
+consciousness. The Beatitudes, nay, the whole of the Sermon on the Mount,
+with the authoritative "I" for ever breaking through, bear witness to the
+high dignity which He ascribed to Himself. Did not this "I" set the people
+thinking?
+
+What must they have thought when, at the close of this discourse, He spoke
+of people who, at the Day of Judgment, would call upon Him as Lord, and
+appeal to the works that they had done in His name, and who yet were
+destined to be rejected because He would not recognise them (Matt. vii.
+21-23)?
+
+What must they have thought of Him when He pronounced those blessed who
+were persecuted and despised for His sake (Matt. v. 11, 12)? By what
+authority did this man forgive sins (Mark ii. 5 ff.)?
+
+In the discourse at the sending forth of the disciples the "I" is still
+more prominent. He demands of men that in the trials to come they shall
+confess Him, that they shall love Him more than father or mother, bear
+their cross after Him, and follow Him to the death, since it is only for
+such that He can entreat His Heavenly Father (Matt. x. 32 ff.). Admitting
+that the expression "Heavenly Father" contained no riddle for the
+listening disciples, since He had taught them to pray "Our Father which
+art in Heaven," we have still to ask who was He whose yea or nay should
+prevail with God to determine the fate of men at the Judgment?
+
+And yet they found it hard, nay impossible, to think of Him as Messiah.
+They guessed Him to be a prophet; some thought of Elias, some of John the
+Baptist risen from the dead, as appears clearly from the answer of the
+disciples at Caesarea Philippi.(286) The Messiah was a supernatural
+personality who was to appear in the last times, and who was not expected
+upon earth before that.
+
+At this point a difficulty presents itself. How could Jesus be Elias for
+the people? Did they not hold John the Baptist to be Elias? Not in the
+least! Jesus was the first and the only person who attributed this office
+to him. And, moreover, He declares it to the people as something
+mysterious, difficult to understand--"If ye can receive it, this is Elias,
+which was for to come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt. xi.
+14, 15). In making this revelation He is communicating to them a piece of
+supernatural knowledge, opening up a part of the mystery of the Kingdom of
+God. Therefore He uses the same formula of emphasis as when making known
+in parables the mystery of the Kingdom of God (Mark iv.).
+
+The disciples were not with Him at this time, and therefore did not learn
+what was the role of John the Baptist. When a little later, in descending
+from the mount of transfiguration He predicted to the three who formed the
+inner circle of His followers the resurrection of the Son of Man, they
+came to Him with difficulties about the rising from the dead--how could
+this be possible when, according to the Pharisees and Scribes, Elias must
+first come?--whereupon Jesus explains to them that the preacher of
+repentance whom Herod had put to death had been Elias (Mark ix. 11-13).
+
+Why did not the people take the Baptist to be Elias? In the first place no
+doubt because he did not describe himself as such. In the next place
+because he did no miracle! He was only a natural man without any evidence
+of supernatural power, only a prophet. In the third place, and that was
+the decisive point, he had himself pointed forward to the coming of Elias.
+He who was to come, he whom he preached, was not the Messiah, but Elias.
+
+He describes him, not as a supernatural personality, not as a judge, not
+as one who will be manifested at the unveiling of the heavenly world, but
+as one who in his work shall resemble himself, only much greater--one who,
+like himself, baptizes, though with the Holy Spirit. Had it ever been
+represented as the work of the Messiah to baptize?
+
+Before the Last Judgment, so it was inferred from Joel, the great
+outpouring of the Spirit was to take place; before the Last Judgment, so
+taught Malachi, Elias was to come. Until these events had occurred the
+manifestation of the Son of Man was not to be looked for. Men's thoughts
+were fixed, therefore, not on the Messiah, but upon Elias and the
+outpouring of the Spirit.(287) The Baptist in his preaching combines both
+ideas, and predicts the coming of the Great One who shall "baptize with
+the Holy Spirit," _i.e._ who brings about the outpouring of the Spirit.
+His own preaching was only designed to secure that at His coming that
+Great One should find a community sanctified and prepared to receive the
+Spirit.
+
+When he heard in the prison of one who did great wonders and signs, he
+desired to learn with certainty whether this was "he who was to come." If
+this question is taken as referring to the Messiahship the whole narrative
+loses its meaning, and it upsets the theory of the Messianic secret, since
+in this case at least one person had become aware, independently, of the
+office which belonged to Jesus, not to mention all the ineptitudes
+involved in making the Baptist here speak in doubt and confusion.
+Moreover, on this false interpretation of the question the point of Jesus'
+discourse is lost, for in this case it is not clear why He says to the
+people afterwards, "If ye can receive it, John himself is Elias." This
+revelation presupposes that Jesus and the people, who had heard the
+question which had been addressed to Him, also gave it its only natural
+meaning, referring it to Jesus as the bearer of the office of Elias.
+
+That even the first Evangelist gives the episode a Messianic setting by
+introducing it with the words "When John heard in the prison of the works
+of the Christ" does not alter the facts of the body of the narrative. The
+sequel directly contradicts the introduction. And this interpretation
+fully explains the evasive answer of Jesus, in which exegesis has always
+recognised a certain reserve without ever being able to make it
+intelligible why Jesus did not simply send him the message, "Yes, I am
+he"--whereto, however, according to modern theology, He would have needed
+to add, "but another kind of Messiah from him whom you expect."
+
+The fact was, the Baptist had put Him in an extremely difficult position.
+He could not answer that He was Elias if He held Himself to be the
+Messiah; on the other hand He could not, and would not, disclose to him,
+and still less to the messengers and the listening multitude, the secret
+of His Messiahship. Therefore He sends this obscure message, which only
+contains a confirmation of the facts which John had already heard and
+closes with a warning, come what may, not to be offended in Him. Of this
+the Baptist was to make what he could.
+
+It mattered, in fact, little how John understood the message. The time was
+much more advanced than he supposed; the hammer of the world's clock had
+risen to strike the last hour. All that he needed to know was that he had
+no cause to doubt.
+
+In revealing to the people the true office of the Baptist, Jesus unveiled
+to them almost the whole mystery of the Kingdom of God, and nearly
+disclosed the secret of His Messiahship. For if Elias was already present,
+was not the coming of the Kingdom close at hand? And if John was Elias,
+who was Jesus?... There could only be one answer: the Messiah. But this
+seemed impossible, because Messiah was expected as a supernatural
+personality. The eulogy on the Baptist is, historically regarded,
+identical in content with the prediction of the Parousia in the discourse
+at the sending forth of the disciples. For after the coming of Elias there
+must follow immediately the judgment and the other events belonging to the
+last time. Now we can understand why in the enumeration of the events of
+the last time in the discourse to the Twelve the coming of Elias is not
+mentioned.
+
+We see here, too, how, in the thought of Jesus, Messianic doctrine forces
+its way into history and simply abolishes the historic aspect of the
+events. The Baptist had not held himself to be Elias, the people had not
+thought of attributing this office to him; the description of Elias did
+not fit him at all, since he had done none of those things which Elias was
+to do: and yet Jesus makes him Elias, simply because He expected His own
+manifestation as Son of Man, and before that it was necessary that Elias
+must first have come. And even when John was dead Jesus still told the
+disciples that in him Elias had come, although the death of Elias was not
+contemplated in the eschatological doctrine, and was in fact unthinkable,
+But Jesus must somehow drag or force the eschatological events into the
+framework of the actual occurrences.
+
+Thus the conception of the "dogmatic element" in the narrative widens in
+an unsuspected fashion. And even what before seemed natural becomes on a
+closer examination doctrinal. The Baptist is made into Elias solely by the
+force of Jesus' Messianic consciousness.
+
+A short time afterwards, immediately upon the return of the disciples, He
+spoke and acted before their eyes in a way which presupposed the Messianic
+secret. The people had been dogging his steps; at a lonely spot on the
+shores of the lake they surrounded Him, and He "taught them about many
+things" (Mark vi. 30-34). The day was drawing to a close, but they held
+closely to Him without troubling about food. In the evening, before
+sending them away, He fed them.
+
+Weisse, long ago, had constantly emphasised the fact that the feeding of
+the multitude was one of the greatest historical problems, because this
+narrative, like that of the transfiguration, is very firmly riveted to its
+historical setting and, therefore, imperatively demands explanation. How
+is the historical element in it to be got at? Certainly not by seeking to
+explain the apparently miraculous in it on natural lines, by representing
+that at the bidding of Jesus people brought out the baskets of provisions
+which they had been concealing, and, thus importing into the tradition a
+natural fact which, so far from being hinted at in the narrative, is
+actually excluded by it.
+
+Our solution is that the whole is historical, except the closing remark
+that they were all filled. Jesus distributed the provisions which He and
+His disciples had with them among the multitude so that each received a
+very little, after He had first offered thanks. The significance lies in
+the giving of thanks and in the fact that they had received from Him
+consecrated food. Because He is the future Messiah, this meal becomes
+without their knowledge the Messianic feast. With the morsel of bread
+which He gives His disciples to distribute to the people He consecrates
+them as partakers in the coming Messianic feast, and gives them the
+guarantee that they, who had shared His table in the time of His
+obscurity, would also share it in the time of His glory. In the prayer He
+gave thanks not only for the food, but also for the coming Kingdom and all
+its blessings. It is the counterpart of the Lord's prayer, where He so
+strangely inserts the petition for daily bread between the petitions for
+the coming of the Kingdom and for deliverance from the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}.
+
+The feeding of the multitude was more than a love-feast, a fellowship-
+meal. It was from the point of view of Jesus a sacrament of salvation.
+
+We never realise sufficiently that in a period when the judgment and the
+glory were expected as close at hand, one thought arising out of this
+expectation must have acquired special prominence--how, namely, in the
+present time a man could obtain a guarantee of coming scatheless through
+the judgment, of being saved and received into the Kingdom, of being
+signed and sealed for deliverance amid the coming trial, as the Chosen
+People in Egypt had a sign revealed to them from God by means of which
+they might be manifest as those who were to be spared. But once we do
+realise this, we can understand why the thought of signing and sealing
+runs through the whole of the apocalyptic literature. It is found as early
+as the ninth chapter of Ezekiel. There, God is making preparation for
+judgment. The day of visitation of the city is at hand. But first the Lord
+calls unto "the man clothed with linen who had the writer's ink-horn by
+his side" and said unto him, "Go through the midst of the city, through
+the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that
+sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst
+thereof." Only after that does He give command to those who are charged
+with the judgment to begin, adding, "But come not near any man upon whom
+is the mark" (Ezek. ix. 4 and 6).
+
+In the fifteenth of the Psalms of Solomon,(288) the last eschatological
+writing before the movement initiated by the Baptist, it is expressly said
+in the description of the judgment that "the saints of God bear a sign
+upon them which saves them."
+
+In the Pauline theology very striking prominence is given to the thought
+of being sealed unto salvation. The apostle is conscious of bearing about
+with him in his body "the marks of Jesus" (Gal. vi. 17), the "dying" of
+Jesus (2 Cor. iv. 10). This sign is received in baptism, since it is a
+baptism "into the death of Christ"; in this act the recipient is in a
+certain sense really buried with Him, and thenceforth walks among men as
+one who belongs, even here below, to risen humanity (Rom. vi. 1 ff.).
+Baptism is the seal, the earnest of the spirit, the pledge of that which
+is to come (2 Cor i. 22; Eph. i. 13, 14, iv. 30).
+
+This conception of baptism as a "salvation" in view of that which was to
+come goes down through the whole of ancient theology. Its preaching might
+really be summed up in the words, "Keep your baptism holy and without
+blemish."
+
+In the Shepherd of Hermas even the spirits of the men of the past must
+receive "the seal, which is the water" in order that they may "bear the
+name of God upon them." That is why the tower is built over the water, and
+the stones which are brought up out of the deep are rolled through the
+water (Vis. iii. and Sim. ix. 16).
+
+In the Apocalypse of John the thought of the sealing stands prominently in
+the foreground. The locusts receive power to hurt those only who have not
+the seal of God on their foreheads (Rev. ix. 4, 5). The beast (Rev. xiii.
+16 ff.) compels men to bear his mark; only those who will not accept it
+are to reign with Christ (Rev. xx. 4). The chosen hundred and forty-four
+thousand bear the name of God and the name of the Lamb upon their
+foreheads (Rev. xiv. 1).
+
+"Assurance of salvation" in a time of eschatological expectation demanded
+some kind of security for the future of which the earnest could be
+possessed in the present. And with this the predestinarian thought of
+election was in complete accord. If we find the thought of being sealed
+unto salvation previously in the Psalms of Solomon, and subsequently in
+the same signification in Paul, in the Apocalypse of John, and down to the
+Shepherd of Hermas, it may be assumed in advance that it will be found in
+some form or other in the so strongly eschatological teaching of Jesus and
+the Baptist.
+
+It may be said, indeed, to dominate completely the eschatological
+preaching of the Baptist, for this preaching does not confine itself to
+the declaration of the nearness of the Kingdom, and the demand for
+repentance, but leads up to an act to which it gives a special reference
+in relation to the forgiveness of sins and the outpouring of the spirit.
+It is a mistake to regard baptism with water as a "symbolic act" in the
+modern sense, and make the Baptist decry his own wares by saying, "I
+baptize only with water, but the other can baptize with the Holy Spirit."
+He is not contrasting the two baptisms, but connecting them--he who is
+baptized by him has the certainty that he will share in the outpouring of
+the Spirit which shall precede the judgment, and at the judgment shall
+receive forgiveness of sins, as one who is signed with the mark of
+repentance. The object of being baptized by him is to secure baptism with
+the Spirit later. The forgiveness of sins associated with baptism is
+proleptic; it is to be realised at the judgment. The Baptist himself did
+not forgive sin.(289) If he had done so, how could such offence have been
+taken when Jesus claimed for Himself the right to forgive sins in the
+present (Mark ii. 10).
+
+The baptism of John was therefore an eschatological sacrament pointing
+forward to the pouring forth of the spirit and to the judgment, a
+provision for "salvation." Hence the wrath of the Baptist when he saw
+Pharisees and Sadducees crowding to his baptism: "Ye generation of vipers,
+who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth now fruits
+meet for repentance" (Matt. iii. 7, 8). By the reception of baptism, that
+is, they are saved from the judgment.
+
+As a cleansing unto salvation it is a divine institution, a revealed means
+of grace. That is why the question of Jesus, whether the baptism of John
+was from heaven or from men, placed the Scribes at Jerusalem in so awkward
+a dilemma (Mark xi. 30).
+
+The authority of Jesus, however, goes farther than that of the Baptist. As
+the Messiah who is to come He can give even here below to those who gather
+about Him a right to partake in the Messianic feast, by this distribution
+of food to them; only, they do not know what is happening to them and He
+cannot solve the riddle for them. The supper at the Lake of Gennesareth
+was a veiled eschatological sacrament. Neither the disciples nor the
+multitude understood what was happening, since they did not know who He
+was who thus made them His guests.(290) This meal must have been
+transformed by tradition into a miracle, a result which may have been in
+part due to the references to the wonders of the Messianic feast which
+were doubtless contained in the prayers, not to speak of the
+eschatological enthusiasm which then prevailed universally. Did not the
+disciples believe that on the same evening, when they had been commanded
+to take Jesus into their ship at the mouth of the Jordan, to which point
+He had walked along the shore--did they not believe that they saw Him come
+walking towards them upon the waves of the sea? The impulse to the
+introduction of the miraculous into the narrative came from the
+unintelligible element with which the men who surrounded Jesus were at
+this time confronted.(291)
+
+The Last Supper at Jerusalem had the same sacramental significance as that
+at the lake. Towards the end of the meal Jesus, after giving thanks,
+distributes the bread and wine. This had as little to do with the
+satisfaction of hunger as the distribution to the Galilaean believers. The
+act of Jesus is an end in itself, and the significance of the celebration
+consists in the fact that it is He Himself who makes the distribution. In
+Jerusalem, however, they understood what was meant, and He explained it to
+them explicitly by telling them that He would drink no more of the fruit
+of the vine until He drank it new in the Kingdom of God. The mysterious
+images which He used at the time of the distribution concerning the
+atoning significance of His death do not touch the essence of the
+celebration, they are only discourses accompanying it.
+
+On this interpretation, therefore, we may think of Baptism and the Lord's
+Supper as from the first eschatological sacraments in the eschatological
+movement which later detached itself from Judaism under the name of
+Christianity. That explains why we find them both in Paul and in the
+earliest theology as sacramental acts, not as symbolic ceremonies, and
+find them dominating the whole Christian doctrine. Apart from the
+assumption of the eschatological sacraments, we can only make the history
+of dogma begin with a "fall" from the earlier purer theology into the
+sacramental magical, without being able to adduce a single syllable in
+support of the idea that after the death of Jesus Baptism and the Lord's
+Supper existed even for an hour as symbolical actions--Paul, indeed, makes
+this supposition wholly impossible.
+
+In any case the adoption of the baptism of John in Christian practice
+cannot be explained except on the assumption that it was the sacrament of
+the eschatological community, a revealed means of securing "salvation"
+which was not altered in the slightest by the Messiahship of Jesus. How
+else could we explain the fact that baptism, without any commandment of
+Jesus, and without Jesus' ever having baptized, was taken over, as a
+matter of course, into Christianity, and was given a special reference to
+the receiving of the Spirit?
+
+It is no use proposing to explain it as having been instituted as a
+symbolical repetition of the baptism of Jesus, thought of as "an anointing
+to the Messiahship." There is not a single passage in ancient theology to
+support such a theory. And we may point also to the fact that Paul never
+refers to the baptism of Jesus in explaining the character of Christian
+baptism, never, in fact, makes any distinct reference to it. And how could
+baptism, if it had been a symbolical repetition of the baptism of Jesus,
+ever have acquired this magic-sacramental sense of "salvation"?
+
+Nothing shows more clearly than the dual character of ancient baptism,
+which makes it the guarantee both of the reception of the Spirit and of
+deliverance from the judgment, that it is nothing else than the
+eschatological baptism of John with a single difference. Baptism with
+water and baptism with the Spirit are now connected not only logically,
+but also in point of time, seeing that since the day of Pentecost the
+period of the outpouring of the Spirit is present. The two portions of the
+eschatological sacrament which in the Baptist's preaching were
+distinguished in point of time--because he did not expect the outpouring of
+the Spirit until some future period--are now brought together, since one
+eschatological condition--the baptism with the Spirit--is now present. The
+"Christianising" of baptism consisted in this and in nothing else; though
+Paul carried it a stage farther when he formed the conception of baptism
+as a mystic partaking in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
+
+Thus the thoroughgoing eschatological interpretation of the Life of Jesus
+puts into the hands of those who are reconstructing the history of dogma
+in the earliest times an explanation of the conception of the sacraments,
+of which they had been able hitherto only to note the presence as an _x_
+of which the origin was undiscoverable, and for which they possessed no
+equation by which it could be evaluated. If Christianity as the religion
+of historically revealed mysteries was able to lay hold upon Hellenism and
+overcome it, the reason of this was that it was already in its purely
+eschatological beginnings a religion of sacraments, a religion of
+eschatological sacraments, since Jesus had recognised a Divine institution
+in the baptism of John, and had Himself performed a sacramental action in
+the distribution of food at the Lake of Gennesareth and at the Last
+Supper.
+
+This being so, the feeding of the multitude also belongs to the dogmatic
+element in the history. But no one had previously recognised it as what it
+really was, an indirect disclosure of the Messianic secret, just as no one
+had understood the full significance of Jesus' description of the Baptist
+as Elias.
+
+But how does Peter at Caesarea Philippi know the secret of his Master?
+What he there declares is not a conviction which had gradually dawned on
+him, and slowly grown through various stages of probability and certainty.
+
+The real character of this incident has been interpreted with remarkable
+penetration by Wrede. The incident itself, he says, is to be understood in
+quite as supernatural a fashion in Mark as in Matthew. But on the other
+hand one does not receive the impression that the writer intends to
+represent the confession as a merit or a discovery of Peter. "For
+according to the text of Mark, Jesus shows no trace of joy or surprise at
+this confession. His only answer consists of the command to say nothing
+about His Messiahship." Keim, whom Wrede quotes, had received a similar
+impression from the Marcan account, and had supposed that Jesus had
+actually found the confession of Peter inopportune.
+
+How is all this to be explained--the supernatural knowledge of Peter and
+the rather curt fashion in which Jesus receives his declaration?
+
+It might be worth while to put the story of the transfiguration side by
+side with the incident at Caesarea Philippi, since there the Divine
+Sonship of Jesus is "a second time" revealed to the "three," Peter, James,
+and John, and the revelation is made supernaturally by a voice from
+heaven. It is rather striking that Mark does not seem to be conscious that
+he is reporting something which the disciples knew already. At the
+beginning of the actual transfiguration Peter still addresses Jesus simply
+as Rabbi (Mark ix. 5). And what does it mean when Jesus, during the
+descent from the mountain, forbids them to speak to any man concerning
+that which they have seen until after the resurrection of the Son of Man?
+That would exclude even the other disciples who knew only the secret of
+His Messiahship. But why should they not be told of the Divine
+confirmation of that which Peter had declared at Caesarea Philippi and
+Jesus had "admitted"?
+
+What has the transfiguration to do with the resurrection of the dead? And
+why are the thoughts of the disciples suddenly busied, not with what they
+have seen, not with the fact that the Son of Man shall rise from the dead,
+but simply with the possibility of the rising from the dead, the
+difficulty being that Elias was not yet present? Those who see in the
+transfiguration a projection backwards of the Pauline theology into the
+Gospel history do not realise what are the principal points and
+difficulties of the narrative. The problem lies in the conversation during
+the descent. Against the Messiahship of Jesus, against His rising from the
+dead, they have only one objection to suggest: Elias had not yet come.
+
+We see here, in the first place, the importance of the revelation which
+Jesus had made to the people in declaring to them the secret that the
+Baptist is Elias. From the standpoint of the eschatological expectation no
+one could recognise Elias in the Baptist, unless he knew of the
+Messiahship of Jesus. And no one could believe in the Messiahship and
+"resurrection" of Jesus, that is, in His Parousia, without presupposing
+that Elias had in some way or other already come. This was therefore the
+primary difficulty of the disciples, the stumbling-block which Jesus must
+remove for them by making the same revelation concerning the Baptist to
+them as to the people. It is also once more abundantly clear that
+expectation was directed at that time primarily to the coming of
+Elias.(292) But since the whole eschatological movement arose out of the
+Baptist's preaching, the natural conclusion is that by "him who was to
+come after" and baptize with the Holy Spirit John meant, not the Messiah,
+but Elias.
+
+But if the non-appearance of Elias was the primary difficulty of the
+disciples in connexion with the Messiahship of Jesus and all that it
+implied, why does it only strike the "three," and moreover, all three of
+them together, now, and not at Caesarea Philippi?(293) How could Peter
+there have declared it and here be still labouring with the rest over the
+difficulty which stood in the way of his own declaration? To make the
+narrative coherent, the transfiguration, as being a revelation of the
+Messiahship, ought to precede the incident at Caesarea Philippi. Now let
+us look at the connexion in which it actually occurs. It falls in that
+inexplicable section Mark viii. 34-ix. 30 in which the multitude suddenly
+appears in the company of Jesus who is sojourning in a Gentile district,
+only to disappear again, equally enigmatically, afterwards, when He sets
+out for Galilee, instead of accompanying Him back to their own country.
+
+In this section everything points to the situation during the days at
+Bethsaida after the return of the disciples from their mission. Jesus is
+surrounded by the people, while what He desires is to be alone with His
+immediate followers. The disciples make use of the healing powers which He
+had bestowed upon them when sending them forth, and have the experience of
+finding that they are not in all cases adequate (Mark ix. 14-29). The
+mountain to which He takes the "three" is not a mountain in the north, or
+as some have suggested, an imaginary mountain of the Evangelist, but the
+same to which Jesus went up to pray and to be alone on the evening of the
+feeding of the multitude (Mark vi. 46 and ix. 2). The house to which He
+goes after His return from the transfiguration is therefore to be placed
+at Bethsaida.
+
+Another thing which points to a sojourn at Bethsaida after the feeding of
+the multitude is the story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida
+(Mark viii. 22-26).
+
+The circumstances, therefore, which we have to presuppose are that Jesus
+is surrounded and thronged by the people at Bethsaida. In order to be
+alone He once more puts the Jordan between Himself and the multitude, and
+goes with the "three" to the mountain where He had prayed after the
+feeding of the five thousand. This is the only way in which we can
+understand how the people failed to follow Him, and He was able really to
+carry out His plan.
+
+But how could this story be torn out of its natural context and its scene
+removed to Caesarea Philippi, where it is both on external and internal
+grounds impossible? What we need to notice is the Marcan account of the
+events which followed the sending forth of the disciples. We have two
+stories of the feeding of the multitude with a crossing of the lake after
+each (Mark vi. 31-56, Mark viii. 1-22), two stories of Jesus going away
+towards the north with the same motive, that of being alone and
+unrecognised. The first time, after the controversy about the washing of
+hands, His course is directed towards Tyre (Mark vii. 24-30), the second
+time, after the demand for a sign, he goes into the district of Caesarea
+Philippi (Mark viii. 27). The scene of the controversy about the washing
+of hands is some locality in the plain of Gennesareth (Mark vi. 53 ff);
+Dalmanutha is named as the place where the sign was demanded (Mark viii.
+10 ff.).
+
+The most natural conclusion is to identify the two cases of feeding the
+multitude, and the two journeys northwards. In that case we should have in
+the section Mark vi. 31-ix. 30, two sets of narratives worked into one
+another, both recounting how Jesus, after the disciples came back to Him,
+went with them from Capernaum to the northern shore of the lake, was there
+surprised by the multitude, and after the meal which He gave them, crossed
+the Jordan by boat to Bethsaida, stayed there for a while, and then
+returned again by ship to the country of Gennesareth, and was there again
+overtaken and surrounded by the people; then after some controversial
+encounters with the Scribes, who at the report of His miracles had come
+down from Jerusalem (Mark vii. 1), left Galilee and again went
+northwards.(294)
+
+The seams at the joining of the narratives can be recognised in Mark vii.
+31, where Jesus is suddenly transferred from the north to Decapolis, and
+in the saying in Mark viii. 14 ff., which makes explicit reference to the
+two miracles of feeding the multitude. Whether the Evangelist himself
+worked these two sets of narratives together, or whether he found them
+already united, cannot be determined, and is not of any direct historical
+interest. The disorder is in any case so complete that we cannot fully
+reconstruct each of the separate sets of narratives.
+
+The external reasons why the narratives of Mark viii. 34-ix. 30, of which
+the scene is on the northern shore of the lake, are placed in this way
+after the incident of Caesarea Philippi are not difficult to grasp. The
+section contains an impressive discourse to the people on following Jesus
+in His sufferings, crucifixion, and death (Mark viii. 34-ix. 1). For this
+reason the whole series of scenes is attached to the revelation of the
+secret of the suffering of the Son of Man; and the redactor did not stop
+to think how the people could suddenly appear, and as suddenly disappear
+again. The statement, too, "He called the people with the disciples" (Mark
+viii. 34), helped to mislead him into inserting the section at this point,
+although this very remark points to the circumstances of the time just
+after the return of the disciples, when Jesus was sometimes alone with the
+disciples, and sometimes calls the eager multitude about Him.
+
+The whole scene belongs, therefore, to the days which He spent at
+Bethsaida, and originally followed immediately upon the crossing of the
+lake, after the feeding of the multitude. It was after Jesus had been six
+days surrounded by the people, not six days after the revelation at
+Caesarea Philippi, that the "transfiguration" took place (Mark ix. 2). On
+this assumption, all the difficulties of the incident at Caesarea Philippi
+are cleared up in a moment; there is no longer anything strange in the
+fact that Peter declares to Jesus who He really is, while Jesus appears
+neither surprised nor especially rejoiced at the insight of His disciple.
+The transfiguration had, in fact, been the revelation of the secret of the
+Messiahship to the three who constituted the inner circle of the
+disciples.(295) And Jesus had not Himself revealed it to them; what had
+happened was, that in a state of rapture common to them all, in which they
+had seen the Master in a glorious transfiguration, they had seen Him
+talking with Moses and Elias and had heard a voice from heaven saying,
+"This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him."
+
+We must always make a fresh effort to realise to ourselves, that Jesus and
+His immediate followers were, at that time, in an enthusiastic state of
+intense eschatological expectation. We must picture them among the people,
+who were filled with penitence for their sins, and with faith in the
+Kingdom, hourly expecting the coming of the Kingdom, and the revelation of
+Jesus as the Son of Man, seeing in the eager multitude itself a sign that
+their reckoning of the time was correct; thus the psychological conditions
+were present for a common ecstatic experience such as is described in the
+account of the transfiguration.
+
+In this ecstasy the "three" heard the voice from heaven saying who He was.
+Therefore, the Matthaean report, according to which Jesus praises Simon
+"because flesh and blood have not revealed it to him, but the Father who
+is in heaven," is not really at variance with the briefer Marcan account,
+since it rightly indicates the source of Peter's knowledge.
+
+Nevertheless Jesus was astonished. For Peter here disregarded the command
+given during the descent from the mount of transfiguration. He had
+"betrayed" to the Twelve Jesus' consciousness of His Messiahship. One
+receives the impression that Jesus did not put the question to the
+disciples in order to reveal Himself to them as Messiah, and that by the
+impulsive speech of Peter, upon whose silence He had counted because of
+His command, and to whom He had not specially addressed the question, He
+was forced to take a different line of action in regard to the Twelve from
+what He had intended. It is probable that He had never had the intention
+of revealing the secret of His Messiahship to the disciples. Otherwise He
+would not have kept it from them at the time of their mission, when He did
+not expect them to return before the Parousia. Even at the transfiguration
+the "three" do not learn it from His lips, but in a state of ecstasy, an
+ecstasy which He shared with them. At Caesarea Philippi it is not He, but
+Peter, who reveals His Messiahship. We may say, therefore, that Jesus did
+not voluntarily give up His Messianic secret; it was wrung from Him by the
+pressure of events.
+
+However that may be, from Caesarea Philippi onwards it was known to the
+other disciples through Peter; what Jesus Himself revealed to them, was
+the secret of his sufferings.
+
+Pfleiderer and Wrede were quite right in pointing to the clear and
+definite predictions of the suffering, death, and resurrection as the
+historically inexplicable element in our reports, since the necessity of
+Jesus' death, by which modern theology endeavours to make His resolve and
+His predictions intelligible, is not a necessity which arises out of the
+historical course of events. There was not present any natural ground for
+such a resolve on the part of Jesus. Had He returned to Galilee, He would
+immediately have had the multitudes flocking after Him again.
+
+In order to make the historical possibility of the resolve to suffer and
+the prediction of the sufferings in some measure intelligible, modern
+theology has to ignore the prediction of the resurrection which is bound
+up with them, for this is "dogmatic." That is, however, not permissible.
+We must, as Wrede insists, take the words as they are, and must not even
+indulge in ingenious explanations of the "three days." Therefore, the
+resolve to suffer and to die are dogmatic; therefore, according to him,
+they are unhistorical, and only to be explained by a literary hypothesis.
+
+But the thoroughgoing eschatological school says they are dogmatic, and
+therefore historical; because they find their explanation in
+eschatological conceptions.
+
+Wrede held that the Messianic conception implied in the Marcan narrative
+is not the Jewish Messianic conception, just because of the thought of
+suffering and death which it involves. No stress must be laid on the fact
+that in Fourth Ezra vii. 29 the Christ dies and rises again, because His
+death takes place at the end of the Messianic Kingdom.(296) The Jewish
+Messiah is essentially a glorious being who shall appear in the last time.
+True, but the case in which the Messiah should be present, prior to the
+Parousia, should cause the final tribulations to come upon the earth, and
+should Himself undergo them, does not arise in the Jewish eschatology as
+described from without. It first arises with the self-consciousness of
+Jesus. Therefore, the Jewish conception of the Messiah has no information
+to give us upon this point.
+
+In order to understand Jesus' resolve to suffer, we must first recognise
+that the mystery of this suffering is involved in the mystery of the
+Kingdom of God, since the Kingdom cannot come until the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} has
+taken place. This certainty of suffering is quite independent of the
+historic circumstances, as the beatitude on the persecuted in the sermon
+on the mount, and the predictions in the discourse at the sending forth of
+the Twelve, clearly show. Jesus' prediction of His own sufferings at
+Caesarea Philippi is precisely as unintelligible, precisely as dogmatic,
+and therefore precisely as historical as the prediction to the disciples
+at the time of their mission. The "must be" of the sufferings is the
+same--the coming of the Kingdom, and of the Parousia, which are dependent
+upon the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} having first taken place.
+
+In the first period Jesus' thoughts concerning His own sufferings were
+included in the more general thought of the sufferings which formed part
+of the mystery of the Kingdom of God. The exhortations to hold steadfastly
+to Him in the time of trial, and not to lose faith in Him, certainly
+tended to suggest that He thought of Himself as the central point amid
+these conflicts and confusions, and reckoned on the possibility of His own
+death as much as on that of others. Upon this point nothing more definite
+can be said, since the mystery of Jesus' own sufferings does not detach
+itself from the mystery of the sufferings connected with the Kingdom of
+God until after the Messianic secret is made known at Caesarea Philippi.
+What is certain is that, for Him, suffering was always associated with the
+Messianic secret, since He placed His Parousia at the end of the pre-
+Messianic tribulations in which He was to have His part.
+
+The suffering, death, and resurrection of which the secret was revealed at
+Caesarea Philippi are not therefore in themselves new or surprising.(297)
+The novelty lies in the form in which they are conceived. The tribulation,
+so far as Jesus is concerned, is now connected with an historic event: He
+will go to Jerusalem, there to suffer death at the hands of the
+authorities.
+
+For the future, however, He no longer speaks of the general tribulation
+which He is to bring upon the earth, nor of the sufferings which await His
+followers, nor of the sufferings in which they must rally round Him. In
+the predictions of the passion there is no word of that; at Jerusalem
+there is no word of that. This thought disappears once for all.
+
+In the secret of His passion which Jesus reveals to the disciples at
+Caesarea Philippi the pre-Messianic tribulation is for others set aside,
+abolished, concentrated upon Himself alone, and that in the form that they
+are fulfilled in His own passion and death at Jerusalem. That was the new
+conviction that had dawned upon Him. He must suffer for others ... that
+the Kingdom might come.
+
+This change was due to the non-fulfilment of the promises made in the
+discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve. He had thought then to let
+loose the final tribulation and so compel the coming of the Kingdom. And
+the cataclysm had not occurred. He had expected it also after the return
+of the disciples. In Bethsaida, in speaking to the multitude which He had
+consecrated by the foretaste of the Messianic feast, as also to the
+disciples at the time of their mission, He had turned their thoughts to
+things to come and had adjured them to be prepared to suffer with Him, to
+give up their lives, not to be ashamed of Him in His humiliation, since
+otherwise the Son of Man would be ashamed of them when He came in glory
+(Mark viii. 34-ix. 1).(298)
+
+In leaving Galilee He abandoned the hope that the final tribulation would
+begin of itself. If it delays, that means that there is still something to
+be done, and yet another of the violent must lay violent hands upon the
+Kingdom of God. The movement of repentance had not been sufficient. When,
+in accordance with His commission, by sending forth the disciples with
+their message, he hurled the fire-brand which should kindle the fiery
+trials of the Last Time, the flame went out. He had not succeeded in
+sending the sword on earth and stirring up the conflict. And until the
+time of trial had come, the coming of the Kingdom and His own
+manifestation as Son of Man were impossible.
+
+That meant--not that the Kingdom was not near at hand--but that God had
+appointed otherwise in regard to the time of trial. He had heard the
+Lord's Prayer in which Jesus and His followers prayed for the coming of
+the Kingdom--and at the same time, for deliverance from the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}. The
+time of trial was not come; therefore God in His mercy and omnipotence had
+eliminated it from the series of eschatological events, and appointed to
+Him whose commission had been to bring it about, instead to accomplish it
+in His own person. As He who was to rule over the members of the Kingdom
+in the future age, He was appointed to serve them in the present, to give
+His life for them, the many (Mark x. 45 and xiv. 24), and to make in His
+own blood the atonement which they would have had to render in the
+tribulation.
+
+The Kingdom could not come until the debt which weighed upon the world was
+discharged. Until then, not only the now living believers, but the chosen
+of all generations since the beginning of the world wait for their
+manifestation in glory--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the countless
+unknown who should come from the East and from the West to sit at tables
+with them at the Messianic feast (Matt. viii. 11). The enigmatic {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}
+for whom Jesus dies are those predestined to the Kingdom, since His death
+must at last compel the Coming of the Kingdom.(299)
+
+This thought Jesus found in the prophecies of Isaiah, which spoke of the
+suffering Servant of the Lord. The mysterious description of Him who in
+His humiliation was despised and misunderstood, who, nevertheless bears
+the guilt of others and afterwards is made manifest in what He has done
+for them, points, He feels, to Himself.
+
+And since He found it there set down that He must suffer unrecognised, and
+that those for whom He suffered should doubt Him, His suffering should,
+nay must, remain a mystery. In that case those who doubted Him would not
+bring condemnation upon themselves. He no longer needs to adjure them for
+their own sakes to be faithful to Him and to stand by Him even amid
+reproach and humiliation; He can calmly predict to His disciples that they
+shall all be offended in Him and shall flee (Mark xiv. 26, 27); He can
+tell Peter, who boasts that he will die with Him, that before the dawn he
+shall deny Him thrice (Mark xiv. 29-31); all that is so set down in the
+Scripture. They must doubt Him. But now they shall not lose their
+blessedness, for He bears all sins and transgressions. That, too, is
+buried in the atonement which He offers.
+
+Therefore, also, there is no need for them to understand His secret. He
+spoke of it to them without any explanation. It is sufficient that they
+should know why He goes up to Jerusalem. They, on their part, are thinking
+only of the coming transformation of all things, as their conversation
+shows. The prospect which He has opened up to them is clear enough; the
+only thing that they do not understand is why He must first die at
+Jerusalem. The first time that Peter ventured to speak to Him about it, He
+had turned on him with cruel harshness, had almost cursed him (Mark viii.
+32, 33); from that time forward they no longer dared to ask Him anything
+about it. The new thought of His own passion has its basis therefore in
+the authority with which Jesus was armed to bring about the beginning of
+the final tribulation. Ethically regarded, His taking the suffering upon
+Himself is an act of mercy and compassion towards those who would
+otherwise have had to bear these tribulations, and perhaps would not have
+stood the test. Historically regarded, the thought of His sufferings
+involves the same lofty treatment both of history and eschatology as was
+manifested in the identification of the Baptist with Elias. For now He
+identifies His condemnation and execution, which are to take place on
+natural lines, with the predicted pre-Messianic tribulations. This
+imperious forcing of eschatology into history is also its destruction; its
+assertion and abandonment at the same time.
+
+Towards Passover, therefore, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, solely in order
+to die there.(300) "It is," says Wrede, "beyond question the opinion of
+Mark that Jesus went to Jerusalem because He had decided to die; that is
+obvious even from the details of the story." It is therefore a mistake to
+speak of Jesus as "teaching" in Jerusalem. He has no intention of doing
+so. As a prophet He foretells in veiled parabolic form the offence which
+must come (Mark xii. 1-12), exhorts men to watch for the Parousia,
+pictures the nature of the judgment which the Son of Man shall hold, and,
+for the rest, thinks only how He can so provoke the Pharisees and the
+rulers that they will be compelled to get rid of Him. That is why He
+violently cleanses the Temple, and attacks the Pharisees, in the presence
+of the people, with passionate invective.
+
+From the revelation at Caesarea Philippi onward, all that belongs to the
+history of Jesus, in the strict sense, are the events which lead up to His
+death; or, to put it more accurately, the events in which He Himself is
+the sole actor. The other things which happen, the questions which are
+laid before Him for decision, the episodic incidents which occur in those
+days, have nothing to do with the real "Life of Jesus," since they
+contribute nothing to the decisive issue, but merely form the anecdotic
+fringes of the real outward and inward event, the deliberate bringing down
+of death upon Himself.
+
+It is in truth surprising that He succeeded in transforming into history
+this resolve which had its roots in dogma, and really dying alone. Is it
+not almost unintelligible that His disciples were not involved in His
+fate? Not even the disciple who smote with the sword was arrested along
+with Him (Mark xiv. 47); Peter, recognised in the courtyard of the High
+Priest's house as one who had been with Jesus the Nazarene, is allowed to
+go free.
+
+For a moment indeed, Jesus believes that the "three" are destined to share
+His fate, not from any outward necessity, but because they had professed
+themselves able to suffer the last extremities with Him. The sons of
+Zebedee, when He asked them whether, in order to sit at His right hand and
+His left, they are prepared to drink His cup and be baptized with His
+baptism, had declared that they were, and thereupon He had predicted that
+they should do so (Mark x. 38, 39). Peter again had that very night, in
+spite of the warning of Jesus, sworn that he would go even unto death with
+Him (Mark xiv. 30, 31). Hence He is conscious of a higher possibility that
+these three are to go through the trial with Him. He takes them with Him
+to Gethsemane and bids them remain near Him and watch with Him. And since
+they do not perceive the danger of the hour, He adjures them to watch and
+pray. They are to pray that they may not have to pass through the trial
+({~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DASIA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}) since, though the spirit is willing, the
+flesh is weak. Amid His own sore distress He is anxious about them and
+their capacity to share His trial as they had declared their willingness
+to do.(301)
+
+Here also it is once more made clear that for Jesus the necessity of His
+death is grounded in dogma, not in external historical facts. Above the
+dogmatic eschatological necessity, however, there stands the omnipotence
+of God, which is bound by no limitations. As Jesus in the Lord's Prayer
+had taught His followers to pray for deliverance from the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, and
+as in His fears for the three He bids them pray for the same thing, so now
+He Himself prays for deliverance, even in this last moment when He knows
+that the armed band which is coming to arrest Him is already on the way.
+Literal history does not exist for Him, only the will of God; and this is
+exalted even above eschatological necessity.
+
+But how did this exact agreement between the fate of Jesus and His
+predictions come about? Why did the authorities strike at Him only, not at
+His whole following, not even at the disciples? He was arrested and
+condemned on account of His Messianic claims. But how did the High Priest
+know that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah? And why does he put the
+accusation as a direct question without calling witnesses in support of
+it? Why was the attempt first made to bring up a saying about the Temple
+which could be interpreted as blasphemy in order to condemn Him on this
+ground (Mark xiv. 57-59)? Before that again, as is evident from Mark's
+account, they had brought up a whole crowd of witnesses in the hope of
+securing evidence sufficient to justify His condemnation; and the attempt
+had not succeeded.
+
+It was only after all these attempts had failed that the High Priest
+brought his accusation concerning the Messianic claim, and he did so
+without citing the three necessary witnesses. Why so? Because he had not
+got them. The condemnation of Jesus depended on His own admission. That
+was why they had endeavoured to convict Him upon other charges.(302)
+
+This wholly unintelligible feature of the trial confirms what is evident
+also from the discourses and attitude of Jesus at Jerusalem, viz. that He
+had not been held by the multitude to be the Messiah, that the idea of His
+making such claims had not for a moment occurred to them--lay in fact for
+them quite beyond the range of possibility. Therefore He cannot have made
+a Messianic entry.
+
+According to Havet, Brandt, Wellhausen, Dalman, and Wrede the ovation at
+the entry had no Messianic character whatever. It is wholly mistaken, as
+Wrede quite rightly remarks, to represent matters as if the Messianic
+ovation was forced upon Jesus--that He accepted it with inner repugnance
+and in silent passivity. For that would involve the supposition that the
+people had for a moment regarded Him as Messiah and then afterwards had
+shown themselves as completely without any suspicion of His Messiahship as
+though they had in the interval drunk of the waters of Lethe. The exact
+opposite is true: Jesus Himself made the preparations for the Messianic
+entry. Its Messianic features were due to His arrangements. He made a
+point of riding upon the ass, not because He was weary, but because He
+desired that the Messianic prophecy of Zech. ix. 9 should be secretly
+fulfilled.
+
+The entry is therefore a Messianic act on the part of Jesus, an action in
+which His consciousness of His office breaks through, as it did at the
+sending forth of the disciples, in the explanation that the Baptist was
+Elias, and in the feeding of the multitude. But others can have had no
+suspicion of the Messianic significance of that which was going on before
+their eyes. The entry into Jerusalem was therefore Messianic for Jesus,
+but not Messianic for the people.
+
+But what was He for the people? Here Wrede's theory that He was a teacher
+again refutes itself. In the triumphal entry there is more than the
+ovation offered to a teacher. The jubilations have reference to "Him who
+is to come"; it is to Him that the acclamations are offered and because of
+Him that the people rejoice in the nearness of the Kingdom, as in Mark,
+the cries of jubilation show; for here, as Dalman rightly remarks, there
+is actually no mention of the Messiah.
+
+Jesus therefore made His entry into Jerusalem as the Prophet, as Elias.
+That is confirmed by Matthew (xxi. 11), although Matthew gives a Messianic
+colouring to the entry itself by bringing in the acclamation in which He
+was designated the Son of David, just as, conversely, he reports the
+Baptist's question rightly, and introduces it wrongly, by making the
+Baptist hear of the "works of the Christ."
+
+Was Mark conscious, one wonders, that it was not a Messianic entry that he
+was reporting? We do not know. It is not inherently impossible that, as
+Wrede asserts, "he had no real view concerning the historical life of
+Jesus," did not know whether Jesus was recognised as Messiah, and took no
+interest in the question from an historical point of view. Fortunately for
+us! For that is why he simply hands on tradition and does not write a Life
+of Jesus.
+
+The Marcan hypothesis went astray in conceiving this Gospel as a Life of
+Jesus written with either complete or partial historical consciousness,
+and interpreting it on these lines, on the sole ground that it only brings
+in the name Son of Man twice prior to the incident at Caesarea Philippi.
+The Life of Jesus cannot be arrived at by following the arrangement of a
+single Gospel, but only on the basis of the tradition which is preserved
+more or less faithfully in the earliest pair of Synoptic Gospels.
+
+Questions of literary priority, indeed literary questions in general, have
+in the last resort, as Keim remarked long ago, nothing to do with the
+gaining of a clear idea of the course of events, since the Evangelists had
+not themselves a clear idea of it before their minds; it can only be
+arrived at hypothetically by an experimental reconstruction based on the
+necessary inner connexion of the incidents.
+
+But who could possibly have had in early times a clear conception of the
+Life of Jesus? Even its most critical moments were totally unintelligible
+to the disciples who had themselves shared in the experiences, and who
+were the only sources for the tradition.
+
+They were simply swept through these events by the momentum of the purpose
+of Jesus. That is why the tradition is incoherent. The reality had been
+incoherent too, since it was only the secret Messianic self-consciousness
+of Jesus which created alike the events and their connexion. Every Life of
+Jesus remains therefore a reconstruction on the basis of a more or less
+accurate insight into the nature of the dynamic self-consciousness of
+Jesus which created the history.
+
+The people, whatever Mark may have thought, did not offer Jesus a
+Messianic ovation at all; it was He who, in the conviction that they were
+wholly unable to recognise it, played with His Messianic self-
+consciousness before their eyes, just as He did at the time after the
+sending forth of the disciples, when, as now, He thought the end at hand.
+It was in the same way, too, that He closed the invective against the
+Pharisees with the words "I say unto you, ye shall see me no more until ye
+shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord" (Matt.
+xxiii. 39). This saying implies His Parousia.
+
+Similarly He is playing with His secret in that crucial question regarding
+the Messiahship in Mark xii. 35-37. There is no question of dissociating
+the Davidic Sonship from the Messiahship.(303) He asks only how can the
+Christ in virtue of His descent from David be, as his son, inferior to
+David, and yet be addressed by David in the Psalm as his Lord? The answer
+is; by reason of the metamorphosis and Parousia in which natural
+relationships are abolished and the scion of David's line who is the
+predestined Son of Man shall take possession of His unique glory.
+
+Far from rejecting the Davidic Sonship in this saying, Jesus, on the
+contrary, presupposes His possession of it. That raises the question
+whether He did not really during His lifetime regard Himself as a
+descendant of David and whether He was not regarded as such. Paul, who
+otherwise shows no interest in the earthly phase of the existence of the
+Lord, certainly implies His descent from David.
+
+The blind man at Jericho, too, cries out to the Nazarene prophet as "Son
+of David" (Mark x. 47). But in doing so he does not mean to address Jesus
+as Messiah, for afterwards, when he is brought to Him he simply calls Him
+"Rabbi" (Mark x. 51). And the people thought nothing further about what he
+had said. When the expectant people bid him keep silence they do not do so
+because the expression Son of David offends them, but because his clamour
+annoys them. Jesus, however, was struck by this cry, stood still and
+caused him, as he was standing timidly behind the eager multitude, to be
+brought to Him. It is possible, of course, that this address is a mere
+mistake in the tradition, the same tradition which unsuspectingly brought
+in the expression Son of Man at the wrong place.
+
+So much, however, is certain: the people were not made aware of the
+Messiahship of Jesus by the cry of the blind man any more than by the
+outcries of the demoniacs. The entry into Jerusalem was not a Messianic
+ovation. All that history is concerned with is that this fact should be
+admitted on all hands. Except Jesus and the disciples, therefore, no one
+knew the secret of His Messiahship even in those days at Jerusalem. But
+the High Priest suddenly showed himself in possession of it. How? Through
+the betrayal of Judas.
+
+For a hundred and fifty years the question has been historically discussed
+why Judas betrayed his Master. That the main question for history was
+_what he betrayed_ was suspected by few and they touched on it only in a
+timid kind of way--indeed the problems of the trial of Jesus may be said to
+have been non-existent for criticism.
+
+The traitorous act of Judas cannot have consisted in informing the
+Sanhedrin where Jesus was to be found at a suitable place for an arrest.
+They could have had that information more cheaply by causing Jesus to be
+watched by spies. But Mark expressly says that Judas when he betrayed
+Jesus did not yet know of a favourable opportunity for the arrest, but was
+seeking such an opportunity. Mark xiv. 10, 11, "And Judas Iscariot, one of
+the twelve, went unto the chief priests, to betray him unto them. And when
+they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him money. And he
+sought how he might conveniently betray him."
+
+In the betrayal, therefore, there were two points, a more general and a
+more special: the general fact by which he gave Jesus into their power,
+and the undertaking to let them know of the next opportunity when they
+could arrest Him quietly, without publicity. The betrayal by which he
+brought his Master to death, in consequence of which the rulers decided
+upon the arrest, knowing that their cause was safe in any case, was the
+betrayal of the Messianic secret. Jesus died because two of His disciples
+had broken His command of silence: Peter when he made known the secret of
+the Messiahship to the Twelve at Caesarea Philippi; Judas Iscariot by
+communicating it to the High Priest. But the difficulty was that Judas was
+the sole witness. Therefore the betrayal was useless so far as the actual
+trial was concerned unless Jesus admitted the charge. So they first tried
+to secure His condemnation on other grounds, and only when these attempts
+broke down did the High Priest put, in the form of a question, the charge
+in support of which he could have brought no witnesses.
+
+But Jesus immediately admitted it, and strengthened the admission by an
+allusion to His Parousia in the near future as Son of Man.
+
+The betrayal and the trial can only be rightly understood when it is
+realised that the public knew nothing whatever of the secret of the
+Messiahship.(304)
+
+It is the same in regard to the scene in the presence of Pilate. The
+people on that morning knew nothing of the trial of Jesus, but came to
+Pilate with the sole object of asking the release of a prisoner, as was
+the custom at the feast (Mark xv. 6-8). The idea then occurs to Pilate,
+who was just about to hand over, willingly enough, this troublesome fellow
+and prophet to the priestly faction, to play off the people against the
+priests and work on the multitude to petition for the release of Jesus. In
+this way he would have secured himself on both sides. He would have
+condemned Jesus to please the priests, and after condemning Him would have
+released Him to please the people. The priests are greatly embarrassed by
+the presence of the multitude. They had done everything so quickly and
+quietly that they might well have hoped to get Jesus crucified before any
+one knew what was happening or had had time to wonder at His non-
+appearance in the Temple.
+
+The priests therefore go among the people and induce them not to agree to
+the Procurator's proposal. How? By telling them why He was condemned, by
+revealing to them the Messianic secret. That makes Him at once from a
+prophet worthy of honour into a deluded enthusiast and blasphemer. That
+was the explanation of the "fickleness" of the Jerusalem mob which is
+always so eloquently described, without any evidence for it except this
+single inexplicable case.
+
+At midday of the same day--it was the 14th Nisan, and in the evening the
+Paschal lamb would be eaten--Jesus cried aloud and expired. He had chosen
+to remain fully conscious to the last.
+
+
+
+
+
+XX. RESULTS
+
+
+Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their
+account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the
+critical study of the Life of Jesus.
+
+The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who
+preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of
+Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never
+had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with
+life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.
+
+This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces,
+cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to
+the surface one after another, and in spite of all the artifice, art,
+artificiality, and violence which was applied to them, refused to be
+planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the
+last hundred and thirty years had been constructed, and were no sooner
+covered over than they appeared again in a new form. The thoroughgoing
+sceptical and the thoroughgoing eschatological school have only completed
+the work of destruction by linking the problems into a system and so
+making an end of the _Divide et impera_ of modern theology, which
+undertook to solve each of them separately, that is, in a less difficult
+form. Henceforth it is no longer permissible to take one problem out of
+the series and dispose of it by itself, since the weight of the whole
+hangs upon each.
+
+Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the
+criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which
+have been recognised and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never
+render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-
+historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and
+lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest
+Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic
+conception.
+
+In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the religion of the
+present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own
+thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. Nor will
+He be a figure which can be made by a popular historical treatment so
+sympathetic and universally intelligible to the multitude. The historical
+Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.
+
+The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in
+quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it
+could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed
+the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of
+ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into
+the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to
+meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His
+own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was
+that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep
+Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not
+owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same
+inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its
+original position.
+
+The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by
+liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean
+that Christianity has lost its historical foundation. The work which
+historical theology thought itself bound to carry out, and which fell to
+pieces just as it was nearing completion, was only the brick facing of the
+real immovable historical foundation which is independent of any
+historical confirmation or justification.
+
+Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force
+streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can
+neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the
+solid foundation of Christianity.
+
+The mistake was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time
+by entering into it as a man like ourselves. That is not possible. First
+because such a Jesus never existed. Secondly because, although historical
+knowledge can no doubt introduce greater clearness into an existing
+spiritual life, it cannot call spiritual life into existence. History can
+destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even
+to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute
+to the making of the present is not given unto it.
+
+But it is impossible to over-estimate the value of what German research
+upon the Life of Jesus has accomplished. It is a uniquely great expression
+of sincerity, one of the most significant events in the whole mental and
+spiritual life of humanity. What has been done for the religious life of
+the present and the immediate future by scholars such as P. W. Schmidt,
+Bousset, Juelicher, Weinel, Wernle--and their pupil Frenssen--and the others
+who have been called to the task of bringing to the knowledge of wider
+circles, in a form which is popular without being superficial, the results
+of religious-historical study, only becomes evident when one examines the
+literature and social culture of the Latin nations, who have been scarcely
+if at all touched by the influence of these thinkers.
+
+And yet the time of doubt was bound to come. We modern theologians are too
+proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too
+confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical
+theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could build up by the
+increase of historical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity and set
+free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea, and prevents us
+from seeing that the task which we have grappled with and in some measure
+discharged is only one of the intellectual preliminaries of the great
+religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a
+roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood Him, in
+order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present.
+This roundabout way has now been closed by genuine history.
+
+There was a danger of our thrusting ourselves between men and the Gospels,
+and refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus.
+
+There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small,
+because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and
+human psychology. To see that, one need only read the Lives of Jesus
+written since the 'sixties, and notice what they have made of the great
+imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have weakened down His imperative
+world-contemning demands upon individuals, that He might not come into
+conflict with our ethical ideals, and might tune His denial of the world
+to our acceptance of it. Many of the greatest sayings are found lying in a
+corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed. No
+small portion of elemental religious power needed to be drawn off from His
+sayings to prevent them from conflicting with our system of religious
+world-acceptance. We have made Jesus hold another language with our time
+from that which He really held.
+
+In the process we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed our own
+thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and
+make them speak to us out of the past. It is nothing less than a
+misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and
+ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts--even
+to its beggarly pseudo-metaphysic with which it has banished genuine
+speculative metaphysic from the sphere of religion--in Jesus, and
+represents Him as expressing them. It had almost deserved the reproach:
+"he who putteth his hand to the plough, and looketh back, is not fit for
+the Kingdom of God."
+
+It was no small matter, therefore, that in the course of the critical
+study of the Life of Jesus, after a resistance lasting for two
+generations, during which first one expedient was tried and then another,
+theology was forced by genuine history to begin to doubt the artificial
+history with which it had thought to give new life to our Christianity,
+and to yield to the facts, which, as Wrede strikingly said, are sometimes
+the most radical critics of all. History will force it to find a way to
+transcend history, and to fight for the lordship and rule of Jesus over
+this world with weapons tempered in a different forge.
+
+We are experiencing what Paul experienced. In the very moment when we were
+coming nearer to the historical Jesus than men had ever come before, and
+were already stretching out our hands to draw Him into our own time, we
+have been obliged to give up the attempt and acknowledge our failure in
+that paradoxical saying: "If we have known Christ after the flesh yet
+henceforth know we Him no more." And further we must be prepared to find
+that the historical knowledge of the personality and life of Jesus will
+not be a help, but perhaps even an offence to religion.
+
+But the truth is, it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as
+spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can
+help it. Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from
+Him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that
+which overcomes the world.
+
+It is not given to history to disengage that which is abiding and eternal
+in the being of Jesus from the historical forms in which it worked itself
+out, and to introduce it into our world as a living influence. It has
+toiled in vain at this undertaking. As a water-plant is beautiful so long
+as it is growing in the water, but once torn from its roots, withers and
+becomes unrecognisable, so it is with the historical Jesus when He is
+wrenched loose from the soil of eschatology, and the attempt is made to
+conceive Him "historically" as a Being not subject to temporal conditions.
+The abiding and eternal in Jesus is absolutely independent of historical
+knowledge and can only be understood by contact with His spirit which is
+still at work in the world. In proportion as we have the Spirit of Jesus
+we have the true knowledge of Jesus.
+
+Jesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time,
+but His spirit, which lies hidden in His words, is known in simplicity,
+and its influence is direct. Every saying contains in its own way the
+whole Jesus. The very strangeness and unconditionedness in which He stands
+before us makes it easier for individuals to find their own personal
+standpoint in regard to Him.
+
+Men feared that to admit the claims of eschatology would abolish the
+significance of His words for our time; and hence there was a feverish
+eagerness to discover in them any elements that might be considered not
+eschatologically conditioned. When any sayings were found of which the
+wording did not absolutely imply an eschatological connexion there was
+great jubilation--these at least had been saved uninjured from the coming
+_debacle_.
+
+But in reality that which is eternal in the words of Jesus is due to the
+very fact that they are based on an eschatological world-view, and contain
+the expression of a mind for which the contemporary world with its
+historical and social circumstances no longer had any existence. They are
+appropriate, therefore, to any world, for in every world they raise the
+man who dares to meet their challenge, and does not turn and twist them
+into meaninglessness, above his world and his time, making him inwardly
+free, so that he is fitted to be, in his own world and in his own time, a
+simple channel of the power of Jesus.
+
+Modern Lives of Jesus are too general in their scope. They aim at
+influencing, by giving a complete impression of the life of Jesus, a whole
+community. But the historical Jesus, as He is depicted in the Gospels,
+influenced individuals by the individual word. They understood Him so far
+as it was necessary for them to understand, without forming any conception
+of His life as a whole, since this in its ultimate aims remained a mystery
+even for the disciples.
+
+Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, modern
+theology is determined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching
+of Jesus. Therein lies its weakness. The world affirms itself
+automatically; the modern spirit cannot but affirm it. But why on that
+account abolish the conflict between modern life, with the world-affirming
+spirit which inspires it as a whole, and the world-negating spirit of
+Jesus? Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of
+fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with
+Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods--a
+conflict in which it may never rest? For the general, for the institutions
+of society, the rule is: affirmation of the world, in conscious opposition
+to the view of Jesus, on the ground that the world has affirmed itself!
+This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian,
+must in the individual spirit be Christianised and transfigured by the
+personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus.
+It is only by means of the tension thus set up that religious energy can
+be communicated to our time. There was a danger that modern theology, for
+the sake of peace, would deny the world-negation in the sayings of Jesus,
+with which Protestantism was out of sympathy, and thus unstring the bow
+and make Protestantism a mere sociological instead of a religious force.
+There was perhaps also a danger of inward insincerity, in the fact that it
+refused to admit to itself and others that it maintained its affirmation
+of the world in opposition to the sayings of Jesus, simply because it
+could not do otherwise.
+
+For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should
+overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and
+send upon earth, not peace, but a sword. He was not teacher, not a
+casuist; He was an imperious ruler. It was because He was so in His inmost
+being that He could think of Himself as the Son of Man. That was only the
+temporally conditioned expression of the fact that He was an authoritative
+ruler. The names in which men expressed their recognition of Him as such,
+Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, have become for us historical parables.
+We can find no designation which expresses what He is for us.
+
+He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-
+side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same
+word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil
+for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise
+or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the
+sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an
+ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.
+
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS
+
+
+(Including Reference To English Translations)
+
+Ammon, Christoph Friedrich von. Fortbildung des Christentums (Leipzig,
+            1840);
+  Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu mit steter Ruecksicht auf die vorhandenen
+              Quellen (1842-1847), 11, 97, 104 f., 117 f.
+
+Anonymous Works--
+  Das Leben Napoleons kritisch geprueft. Aus dem Englischen (see under
+              Whateley) nebst einigen Nutzanwendungen auf das Leben-Jesu
+              von Strauss (1836), 112
+
+  Did Jesus live 100 B.C.? (London and Benares, Theosophical Publishing
+              Society, 1903), 327
+
+  Dr. Strauss und die Zuericher Kirche (Basle, 1839), 103
+
+  Wichtige Enthuellungen ueber die wirkliche Todesart Jesu (5th ed.,
+              Leipzig, 1849);
+    Historische Enthuellungen ueber die wirklichen Ereignisse der Geburt und
+                Jugend Jesu (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1849), 161 f.
+
+  Zwei Gespraeche ueber die Ansicht des Herrn Dr. Strauss von der
+              evangelischen Geschichte (Jena, 1839), 100
+
+Baader, Franz. Ueber das Leben-Jesu von Strauss (Munich, 1836), 100
+
+Bahrdt, Karl Friedrich. Briefe ueber die Bibel im Volkston (1782);
+  Ausfuehrung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu (1784-1792);
+  Die saemtlichen Reden Jesu aus den Evangelien ausgezogen (1786), 4, 5,
+              38, 39 f., 46, 53, 59, 299, 313
+
+Baldensperger, Wilhelm. Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der
+            messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit (Strassburg, 1888, 2nd
+            ed. 1892, 3rd ed. pt. i. 1903), 12, 233-237, 250, 266, 278 f.,
+            365, 366
+
+Barth, Fritz. Die Hauptprobleme des Lebens Jesu (1st ed. 1899, 2nd ed.
+            1903), 301
+
+Bauer, Bruno. Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (Bremen,
+            1840);
+  Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Leipzig, 1841-1842);
+  Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs (Berlin,
+              1850-1851);
+  Kritik der Apostelgeschichte (1850);
+  Kritik der Paulinischen Briefe (Berlin, 1850-1852);
+  Philo, Strauss, Renan und das Urchristentum (Berlin, 1874);
+  Christus und die Caesaren (Berlin, 1877);
+  Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (Zurich,
+              1843), 5, 9, 10, 12, 137-160, 186 f., 221, 231, 256-258, 305
+              f., 312, 315, 328, 332, 335 f., 338, 342, 346, 358, 368, 388
+
+Baumer, Friedrich. Schwarz, Strauss, Renan (Leipzig, 1864), 191
+
+Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Kritische Untersuchungen ueber die kanonischen
+            Evangelien (Tuebingen, 1847), 25, 58, 68, 87, 89, 124, 182,
+            195, 201, 229
+
+Bergh van Eysinga, Van den. Indische Einfluesse auf evangelische
+            Erzaehlungen (Goettingen, 1904), 290
+
+Bernhard ter Haar (Utrecht). Zehn Vorlesungen ueber Renans "Leben-Jesu"
+            (German by H. Doermer, Gotha, 1864), 191
+
+Beyschlag, Willibald. Ueber das Leben-Jesu von Renan (Berlin, 1864);
+  Das Leben-Jesu (pt. i. 1885, pt. ii. 1886, 2nd ed. 1887-1888), 6, 10,
+              190, 215 f., 218
+
+Binder, 68, 69
+
+Bleby, H. W. The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth considered as a Judicial Act
+            (1880), 391
+
+Bleek, 229, 231
+
+Boeklen, E. Die Verwandtschaft der juedisch-christlichen und der parsischen
+            Eschatologie (1902), 287
+
+Bolten, Johann Adrian. Der Bericht des Matthaeus von Jesu dem Messias
+            (Altona, 1792), 271, 276
+
+Bosc, Ernest. La Vie esoterique de Jesus de Nazareth et les origines
+            orientales du christianisme (Paris, 1902), 294, 327
+
+Bousset, Wilhelm. Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum. Ein
+            religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich (Goettingen, 1892);
+  Die juedische Apokalyptik in ihrer religionsgeschichtlichen Herkunft und
+              ihrer Bedeutung fuer das Neue Testament (Berlin, 1903);
+  Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (1902);
+  Was wissen wir von Jesus? Vortraege im Protestantenverein zu Bremen
+              (Halle, 1904);
+  Jesus (Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbuecher, herausgegeben von Schiele,
+              Halle, 1904) (English translation, _Jesus_, by J. P.
+              Trevelyan, London, 1906), 241-249, 255 f., 262, 264, 267,
+              280, 300, 359, 398
+
+Brandt, Wilhelm. Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des
+            Christentums auf Grund einer Kritik der Berichte ueber das
+            Leiden und die Auferstehung Jesu (Leipzig, 1893), 241,
+            256-261, 267, 301, 309, 312, 313, 391
+
+Bretschneider, Karl Gottlob, 85, 118
+
+Brunner, Sebastian. Der Atheist Renan und sein Evangelium (Regensburg,
+            1864), 190
+
+Bugge, Chr. A. Die Hauptparabeln Jesu. (From the Norwegian) (Giessen,
+            1903), 263
+
+Bunsen, Christian Karl Josias, Ritter von. Das Leben Jesu, vol. ix. of
+            Bunsen's "Bibelwerk" (published by Holtzmann, 1865), 200
+
+Cairns, John. Falsche Christi und der wahre Christus, oder Verteidigung
+            der evangelischen Geschichte gegen Strauss und Renan. Aus dem
+            Englischen uebersetzt (Hamburg, 1864) (_False Christ and the
+            True_, A sermon delivered before the National Bible Society of
+            Scotland, Edinburgh, 1864), 191
+
+Capitaine, W. Jesus von Nazareth (Regensburg, 1905), 294
+
+Cassel, Paulus. Bericht ueber Renans Leben-Jesu (Berlin, 1864), 191
+
+"Casuar." Das Leben Luthers kritisch bearbeitet. Herausgegeben von Jul.
+            Ferd. Wurm ("Mexiko, 2836"), 112
+
+Chamberlain, H. S. Worte Christi (1901), 310
+
+Charles, R. H. "The Son of Man" (Expos. Times, 1893), 267
+
+Colani, Timothee. Examen de la vie de Jesus de M. Renan (Strassburg,
+            1864);
+  Jesus-Christ et les croyances messianiques de son temps (Strassburg,
+              1864), 182, 189, 209, 221 f., 226, 229, 233, 248, 372
+
+Cone, Orello. "Jesus' Self-designation in the Synoptic Gospels" (The New
+            World, 1893), 266
+
+Coquerel, Athanase (jun.), 189, 209
+
+Credner, 89
+
+Dalman, Gustaf. Grammatik des juedisch-palaestinensischen Aramaeisch
+            (Leipzig, 1894);
+  Die Worte Jesu. Mit Beruecksichtigung des nachkanonischen Schrifttums und
+              der aramaeischen Sprache, I. (Leipzig, 1898) (authorised
+              English translation by D. M. Kay, _The Words of Jesus_,
+              Edinburgh, 1902), 269, 271, 273-275, 278, 279-281, 286-289,
+              363, 391 f.
+
+Darboy, Georges. Lettre pastorale de Monseigneur l'Archeveque de Paris sur
+            la divinite de Jesus-Christ, et mandement pour le careme de
+            1864, 188
+
+Delff, Hugo. Geschichte des Rabbi Jesus von Nazareth (Leipzig, 1889), 11,
+            323
+
+Delitzsch, Franz, 273, 285
+
+Deutlinger, Martin. Renan und das Wunder. Ein Beitrag zur christlichen
+            Apologetik (Munich, 1864), 190
+
+Didon, Le Pere, de l'ordre des freres precheurs. Jesus Christ (Paris,
+            1891, 2 vols., German, 1895) (English translation, _Jesus
+            Christ_, 2 vols., 1891), 295
+
+Dieu, Louis de, 14
+
+Dillmann, 223
+
+Diodati, Dominicus, 271
+
+Doederlein. Fragmente und Antifragmente (Nuremberg, 1778), 25
+
+Dulk, Albert. Der Irrgang des Lebens Jesu. In geschichtlicher Auffassung
+            dargestellt (pt. i. 1884, pt. ii. 1885), 294, 324
+
+Dupanloup, Felix Antoine Philibert, Eveque d'Orleans. Avertissement a la
+            jeunesse et aux peres de famille sur les attaques dirigees
+            contre la religion par quelques ecrivains de nos jours (Paris,
+            1864), 188
+
+Ebrard, August. Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte
+            (Frankfort, 1842), 97, 116 f.
+
+Edersheim, Alfred. The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (London, 1st
+            ed. 1883, 3rd ed. 1886, 2 vols.), 233
+
+Eerdmanns, B. E. "De Oorsprong van de uitdrukking 'Zoon des Menschen' als
+            evangelische Messiastitel" (Theol. Tijdschr., 1894), 276
+
+Ehrhardt. Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu in Verhaeltnis zu den
+            messianischen Hoffnungen seines Volkes und zu seinem eigenen
+            Messiasbewusstsein (Freiburg, 1895);
+  Le Principe de la morale de Jesus (Paris, 1896), 249
+
+Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 78, 89
+
+Emmerich, Anna Katharina. Das bittere Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi.
+            Herausgegeben von Brentano (1858-1860, new ed. 1895) (English
+            translation, _The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ_,
+            London, 1862);
+  Das Leben Jesu, 3 vols. (1858-1860), 109 f., 295
+
+Ewald, Georg Heinrich August. "Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit," vol.
+            v. of the "Geschichte des Volkes Israel" (Goettingen, 1855, 2nd
+            ed. 1857), English translation of the _Life of Jesus Christ_,
+            by Octavius Glover (London, 1865);
+  Die drei ersten Evangelien (1850), 97, 117, 124, 135
+
+Fiebig, Paul. Der Menschensohn (Tuebingen, 1901);
+  Altjuedische Gleichnisse und die Gleichnisse Jesu (Tuebingen, 1904), 278,
+              286
+
+Frantzen, Wilhelm. Die "Leben-Jesu-" Bewegung seit Strauss (Dorpat, 1898),
+            12
+
+Frenssen, Gustav. Hilligenlei (Berlin, 1905), pp. 462-593: "Die
+            Handschrift" (English translation, _Holy Land_, by M. A.
+            Hamilton, London, 1906), 293, 307-309, 398
+
+Freppel, Charles Emile. Examen critique de la vie de Jesus de M. Renan
+            (Paris, 1864) (German by Kollmus, Vienna, 1864), 188, 190
+
+Frick, Otto. Mythus und Evangelium (Heilbronn, 1879), 112
+
+Furrer, Konrad. Vortraege ueber das Leben Jesu Christi (1902), 301
+
+Gabler, 78
+
+Gardner, P. Exploratio Evangelica. A Brief Examination of the Basis and
+            Origin of Christian Belief (1899, 2nd ed. 1907), 217
+
+Gerlach, Hermann. Gegen Renans Leben-Jesu 1864 (Berlin), 191
+
+Gfroerer, August Friedrich. Kritische Geschichte des Urchristentums (vol.
+            i. 1st ed. 1831, 2nd ed. 1835, vol. ii. 1838), 161, 163-166,
+            195
+
+Ghillany, Friedrich Wilhelm ("Richard von der Alm"). Theologische Briefe
+            an die Gebildeten der deutschen Nation (3 vols. 1863);
+  Die Urteile heidnischer und christlicher Schriftsteller der vier ersten
+              christlichen Jahrhunderte ueber Jesus (1864), 161, 166-172,
+              240, 363
+
+Godet, F. Das Leben Jesu vor seinem oeffentlichen Auftreten (German by M.
+            Reineck, Hanover, 1897), 217
+
+Gratz, 89
+
+Greiling. Das Leben Jesu von Nazareth (1813), 50
+
+Gressman, Hugo, 234
+
+Griesbach, Johann Jakob, 13, 89
+
+Grimm, Eduard. Die Ethik Jesu (Hamburg, 1903), 320
+
+Grimm, Joseph. Das Leben Jesu (Wuerzburg, 6 vols., 2nd ed. 1890-1903), 294
+
+Grotius, Hugo, 270
+
+Gunkel, Hermann, 277
+
+Hagel, Maurus. Dr. Strauss' Leben-Jesu aus dens Standpunkt des
+            Katholicismus betrachtet (1839), 108
+
+Hahn, Werner. Leben-Jesu (Berlin, 1844), 118
+
+Haneberg, Daniel Bonifacius. Ernest Renans Leben-Jesu (Regensburg, 1864),
+            190
+
+Hanson, Sir Richard. The Jesus of History (1869), 202
+
+Harless, Adolf. Die kritische Bearbeitung des Lebens Jesu von David
+            Friedrich Strauss nach ihrem wissenschaftlichen Werte
+            beleuchtet (Erlangen, 1836), 98 f.
+
+Harnack, Adolf, 242, 252, 314
+
+Hartmann, Eduard von. Das Christentum des Neuen Testaments, 2nd ed. of the
+            "Briefe ueber die christliche Religion" (Sachsa-in-the-Harz,
+            1905), 292, 318-320
+
+Hartmann, Julius. Leben Jesu (2 vols., 1837-1839), 101
+
+Hase, Karl August von. Das Leben Jesu (1st ed. 1829);
+  Geschichte Jesu (Leipzig, 1876), 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 28, 58 f., 65, 72,
+              81, 88, 99, 106, 116, 120, 162, 193, 214 f., 218, 220, 229
+
+Haupt, Erich. Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen
+            Evangelien (1895), 241, 250 f.
+
+Hausrath, Adolf. Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte (1st ed., Munich, 1868
+            ff., 3rd ed., vol. i. 1879) (English translation, _A History
+            of the __ New Testament Times, The Time of Jesus_, by C. T.
+            Poynting and P. Quenzer, London, 1878), 214
+
+Havet, Ernest. Jesus dans l'histoire. Examen de la vie de Jesus par M.
+            Renan. Extrait de la Revue des deux mondes (Paris, 1863);
+  Le Christianisme et ses origines, 3me ptie, Le Nouveau Testament (1884),
+              189, 290, 328, 391
+
+Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 49, 68 f., 79 f., 107, 111, 114 f., 122,
+            137, 163, 165, 194
+
+Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 106 f., 111, 115, 143
+
+Hennell, Charles Christian. An Inquiry concerning the Origin of
+            Christianity (London, 1838) (Untersuchungen ueber den Ursprung
+            des Christentums. Vorrede von David Friedrich Strauss, 1840),
+            161
+
+Herder, Johann Gottfried. Vom Erloeser der Menschen. Nach unsern drei
+            ersten Evangelien (1796);
+  Von Gottes Sohn, der Welt Heiland. Nach Johannes Evangelium (1797), 27,
+              29, 34, 89, 203
+
+Hess, Johann Jakob. Geschichte der drei letzten Lebensjahre Jesu (1768
+            ff.), 4, 14, 27-31
+
+Hilgenfeld, Adolf, 124, 222, 266
+
+Hoekstra. "De Christologie van het canonieke Marcus-Evangelie, vergeleken
+            met die van de beide andere synoptische Evangelien" (Theol.
+            Tijdschrift, v., 1871), 328
+
+Hoffmann, Wilhelm. Das Leben-Jesu kritisch bearbeitet von Dr. David Fried.
+            Strauss. Geprueft fuer Theologen und Nicht-Theologen (1836), 99
+
+Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius, 10, 61, 125, 195, 200, 202-205, 209, 218, 220,
+            229, 231, 235, 237, 277, 294
+
+Holtzmann, Oskar. Das Leben Jesu, (1901) (English translation, _The Life
+            of Jesus_, by J. T. Bealby and Maurice A. Canney, London,
+            1904);
+  Das Messianitaetsbewusstsein Jesu und seine neueste Bestreitung. Vortrag
+              (1902);
+  War Jesus Ekstatiker? (Tuebingen, 1903), 208, 293, 295-300, 306 f., 308,
+              312, 359
+
+Hug, Leonhard. Gutachten ueber das Leben-Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet von D.
+            Fr. Strauss (Freiburg, 1840), 97, 108, 109, 271
+
+Ingraham, J. H. The Prince of the House of David (London, 1859) (Der Fuerst
+            aus Davids Hause, new ed., 1896, Brunswick), 326
+
+Inchofer, 270
+
+Issel, 237
+
+Jacobi, Johann Adolf. Die Geschichte Jesu fuer denkende und gemuetvolle
+            Leser (1816), 27, 34
+
+Jonge, De. Jeschua. Der klassische juedische Mann. Zerstoerung des
+            kirchlichen, Enthuellung des juedischen Jesus-Bildes (Berlin,
+            1904), 293, 321 f.
+
+Juelicher, Adolf. Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (pt. i. 1888, pt. ii. 1899);
+  Die Kultur der Gegenwart (Teubner, Berlin, 1905), pp. 40-69;
+  "Jesus," 241, 262-264, 286, 290, 320, 398
+
+Kalthoff, Albert. Das Christus-Problem. Grundlinien zu einer
+            Sozialtheologie (Leipzig, 1902);
+  Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue Beitraege zum Christus-Problem
+              (Leipzig, 1904) (English translation, _The Rise of
+              Christianity_, by Joseph M'Cabe, London, 1907);
+  Das Leben Jesu. Reden gehalten im prot. Reformverein zu Berlin (1880);
+  Was wissen wir von Jesus? Eine Abrechnung mit Professor Bousset in
+              Goettingen (Berlin, 1904), 293, 314-318
+
+Kant, Emmanuel, 50, 105, 322
+
+Kapp, W. Das Christus-und Christentum-Problem bei Kalthoff (Strassburg,
+            1905), 318
+
+Kautzsch, Emil Friedrich, 271
+
+Keim, Theodor. Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara (3 vols., Zurich, pt. i.
+            1867, pt. ii. 1871, pt. iii. 1872);
+  Die Geschichte Jesu. Nach den Ergebnissen heutiger Wissenschaft fuer
+              weitere Kreise uebersichtlich erzaehlt (Zurich, 1872) (English
+              translation of the larger work, _The History of Jesus of
+              Nazara_, by E. M. Geldart and A. Ransom, 6 vols., London,
+              1873-1883), 11, 61, 193, 200, 209, 211-214, 231 f., 310,
+              343, 351, 357, 380, 392
+
+Kienlen, 228
+
+Kirchbach, Wolfgang. Was lehrte Jesus? (Berlin, 1897, 2nd ed. 1902);
+  Das Buch Jesus (Berlin, 1897), 294, 322-324
+
+Koppe, 89
+
+Koestlin, Karl Reinhold, 124
+
+Krabbe. Vorlesungen ueber das Leben Jesu fuer Theologen und Nicht-Theologen
+            (Hamburg, 1839), 100
+
+Kralik, Richard von. Jesu Leben und Werk (Kempten-Nuernberg, 1904), 294
+
+Krauss, S. Das Leben Jesu nach juedischen Quellen (1902), 327
+
+Krueger-Velthusen, W. Leben Jesu. (Elberfeld, 1872), 217
+
+Kuhn, Johannes von. Leben Jesu (Tuebingen, 1840), 108
+
+Kunz, K. Christus medicus (Freiburg, 1905), 325
+
+Lachmann, 89
+
+Lamy. Renans Leben-Jesu vor dem Richterstuhle der Kritik. Uebersetzt von
+            Aug. Rohling (Muenster, 1864), 190
+
+Lange, Johann Peter. Das Leben Jesu, 5 vols. (1844-1847) (English
+            translation, _The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ_, by Sophia
+            Taylor, Edinburgh, 1864), 117
+
+Laengin, G. Der Christus der Geschichte und sein Christentum (2 vols.,
+            1897-1898), 217
+
+Langsdorf, Karl von. Wohlgepruefte Darstellung des Lebens Jesu (Mannheim,
+            1831), 162
+
+Lasserre, Henri. L'Evangile selon Renan (1864, 12 editions, German,
+            Munich, 1864), 188, 190
+
+Lehmann. Renan wider Renan (Zwickau, 1864), 191
+
+Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 5, 14-16, 75
+
+Levi, Giuseppe. Parabeln, Legenden und Gedanken aus Talmud und Midrasch
+            (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1877), 286
+
+Lichtenstein, Wilhelm Jakob. Leben des Herrn Jesu Christi (Erlangen,
+            1856), 101
+
+Lietzmann, Hans. Der Menschensohn (Freiburg, 1896);
+  Zur Menschensohnfrage (1898), 265, 276 f., 285, 289
+
+Lightfoot, John. Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae in quatuor Evangelistas.
+            Herausgegeben von J. B. Carpzov (Leipzig, 1684), 222, 285
+
+Lillie, A. The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity (London,
+            1893), 326
+
+Littre, M., 181
+
+Loisy, Alfred. Le Quatrieme Evangile (Paris, 1903);
+  Les Evangiles synoptiques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1907);
+  L'Evangile et l'Eglise (Paris, 1903) (translated by C. Home, _The Gospel
+              and the Church_, new ed. with a preface by G. Tyrrell,
+              1908), 295
+
+Luecke, 106
+
+Luthardt, Christoph Ernst. Die modernen Darstellungen des Lebens Jesu.
+            Vortrag (Leipzig, 1864), 191, 209
+
+Luther, 13
+
+Mack, Joseph. Bericht ueber des Herrn Dr. Strauss' historische Bearbeitung
+            des Lebens Jesu (1837), 108
+
+Manen, van, 286
+
+Marius, Emmanuel. Die Persoenlichkeit Jesu mit besonderer Ruecksicht auf die
+            Mythologien und Mysterien der alten Voelker (Leipzig, 1879),
+            112
+
+Meinhold, J. Jesus und das Alte Testament (1896), 255
+
+Meuschen, Johann Gerhardt, 285
+
+Meyer, Arnold. Jesu Muttersprache (Leipzig, 1896), 229, 231, 265, 269,
+            271, 274, 276, 286, 287, 289
+
+Michaelis, 49, 271
+
+Michelis. Renans Roman vom Leben-Jesu (Muenster, 1864), 190
+
+Mueller, A. Jesus ein Arier (Leipzig, 1904), 327
+
+Mueller, Max, 290
+
+Mussard, Eugene. Du systeme mythique applique a l'histoire de la vie de
+            Jesus (1838), 112
+
+Nahor, Pierre (Emilie Lerou), Jesus. (German by Walther Bloch, Berlin,
+            1905), 325
+
+Neander, August Wilhelm. Das Leben Jesu Christi (Hamburg, 1837) (English
+            translation, _The Life of Jesus Christ_, by J. M'Clintock and
+            C. E. Blumenthal, London, 1851);
+  Gutachten ueber das Buch des Dr. Strauss', Leben-Jesu (1836), 72, 97,
+              101-103, 116, 139
+
+Nestle, 276
+
+Neubauer, Adolf, 273
+
+Neumann, Arno. Jesus wie er geschichtlich war (Freiburg, 1904), 320
+
+Nicolas, Amadee. Renan et sa vie de Jesus sous les rapports moral, legal
+            et litteraire (Paris-Marseille, 1864), 188
+
+Nippold, Friedrich. Der Entwicklungsgang des Lebens Jesu im Wortlaut der
+            drei ersten Evangelien (Hamburg, 1895);
+  Die psychiatrische Seite der Heilstaetigkeit Jesu (1889), 301, 324
+
+Noack, Ludwig. Die Geschichte Jesu (2nd ed., Mannheim, 1876);
+  Aus der Jordanwiege nach Golgatha (1870-1871), 161 f., 172-179, 185, 322
+
+Nork, J., 285, 286
+
+Notowitsch, Nicolas. La Vie inconnue de Jesus-Christ (Paris, 1894)
+            (German, Stuttgart, 1894), 290, 326
+
+Oort, H. L. Die Uitdrukking {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~} in het Nieuwe Testament
+            (Leiden, 1893), 266, 278, 286
+
+Opitz, Ernst August. Geschichte und Characterzuege Jesu (1812), 27, 34
+
+Osiander, Andreas, 13
+
+Osiander, Johann Ernst. Apologie des Lebens Jesu gegenueber dem neuesten
+            Versuch, es in Mythen aufzuloesen (1837), 100
+
+Osterzee, J. J. van (Utrecht). Geschichte oder Roman? Das Leben-Jesu von
+            Ernest Renan vorlaeufig beleuchtet. (From the Dutch) (Hamburg,
+            1864), 191
+
+Otto, Rudolf. Leben und Wirken Jesu nach historisch-kritischer Auffassung.
+            Vortrag (Goettingen, 1902), 301
+
+Paul, Ludwig. Die Vorstellung vom Messias und vom Gottesreich bei den
+            Synoptikern (Bonn, 1895), 265
+
+Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob. Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage einer
+            reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums (1828), 4, 28, 37, 48 f.,
+            104, 271, 276, 303
+
+Pfleiderer, Otto. Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehren in
+            geschichtlichem Zusammenhang beschrieben (2nd ed., Berlin,
+            1902, 2 vols.) (English translation, _Primitive Christianity_,
+            vols. i. and ii. (vol. i. of original), London, 1906, 1909);
+  Die Entstehung des Urchristentums (Munich, 1905) (English translation,
+              _Christian Origins_, by D. A. Huebsch, London, 1905), 229,
+              293, 309, 311-313, 384
+
+Plank. Geschichte des Christentums (Goettingen, 1818), 34
+
+Pressel, Theodor. Leben Jesu Christi (1857), 101
+
+Pressense, Edmond Dehoult de. Jesus-Christ, son temps, sa vie, son oeuvre
+            (Paris, 1865) (English translation, _Jesus Christ, His Times,
+            His Life, His Work_, by A. Harwood, 3rd ed., London, 1869);
+  L'Ecole critique et Jesus-Christ, a propos de la vie de Jesus de M.
+              Renan, 180, 189
+
+Quinet, Edgar, 108
+
+Rauch, C. Jeschua ben Joseph (Deichert, 1899), 326
+
+Regla, Paul de. Jesus von Nazareth, (German by A. Just, Leipzig, 1894),
+            294, 325
+
+Reimarus, Hermann Samuel. Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Juenger (published
+            by Lessing, Brunswick, 1778) (English translation, _The Object
+            of Jesus and His disciples, as seen in the New Testament_,
+            edited by A. Voysey, 1879), 4, 9, 10, 13-26, 75, 94, 107, 120,
+            159, 166, 172, 221, 239, 264, 303, 312, 319, 345, 365
+
+Reinhard, Franz Volkmar. Versuch ueber den Plan, welchen der Stifter der
+            christlichen Religion zum Besten der Menschheit entwarf
+            (1798), 4, 31 f., 48, 206
+
+Renan, Ernest. La Vie de Jesus (Paris, 1863), German, 1895 (English
+            translation, _The Life of Jesus_, London, 1864; translated
+            with an introduction by W. G. Hutchison, London, 1898), 11,
+            75, 108, 180-192, 193 f., 197, 200, 207, 213 f., 219, 225,
+            229, 252, 259, 290, 295, 303, 309, 310
+
+Resch, 273
+
+Reuss, Eduard, 124, 182, 189, 228
+
+Reville, Albert. La Vie de Jesus de Renan devant les orthodoxes et devant
+            la critique (1864), 125, 189, 249
+
+Ritschl, Albrecht, 1, 124 f., 250, 320
+
+Robertson, J. M. Christianity and Mythology (London, 1900), 290 f.
+
+Rogers, A. K. The Life and Teachings of Jesus: a critical analysis, etc.
+            (London and New York, 1894), 249
+
+Rosegger, Peter. Frohe Botschaft eines armen Suenders (Leipzig, 1906), 326
+
+Rossi, Giambernardo de. Dissertazione della lingua propria di Christo e
+            degli Ebrei nazionali della Palestina da' tempi de' Maccabei
+            in disamina del sentimento di un recente scrittore italiano
+            (Parma, 1772), 271
+
+Salvator. Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine (Paris, 1838, 2 vols.), 162
+
+Sanday, 90
+
+Saumaise, Claude, 270
+
+Scaliger, Justus, 270
+
+Schegg, Peter. Sechs Buecher des Lebens Jesu (Freiburg, 1874-1875), 294
+
+Schell, Hermann. Christus (Mainz, 1903), 294 f.
+
+Schenkel, Daniel. Das Charakterbild Jesu (Wiesbaden, 1st and 2nd ed. 1864,
+            4th ed. 1873) (English translation, _A Sketch of the Character
+            of Jesus_, London, 1869), 11, 103, 131, 193, 200, 203,
+            205-210, 215, 218, 220, 229, 310
+
+Scherer, Edmond, 189, 191, 209
+
+Scherer, Edmond, und Athanase Coquerel (jun.). Zwei franzoesische Stimmen
+            ueber Renans Leben-Jesu (Regensburg, 1864), 189
+
+Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel. Das Leben Jesu (1864), 49, 58, 62
+            f., 70, 73, 80, 81, 85, 88, 89, 101 f., 108, 116, 127, 139,
+            195, 197, 218, 233, 320
+
+Schmiedel, Otto. Die Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tuebingen,
+            1902), 12, 22, 293, 301, 303, 305, 312
+
+Schmiedel, P., 277
+
+Schmidt, N. "Was {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~}{~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~} a Messianic Title?" (Journal of the Society for
+            Biblical Literature, xv., 1896), 277
+
+Schmidt, Paul Wilhelm. Die Geschichte Jesu, i. (Freiburg, 1899), ii.
+            (Tuebingen, 1904), 265, 278, 293, 301, 304, 308, 398
+
+Schmoller. Ueber die Lehre vom Reiche Gottes im Neuen Testament, 237
+
+Scholten, 231
+
+Schoettgen, Christian, 285
+
+Schuerer, Emil. Geschichte des juedischen Volkes ins Zeitalter Jesu Christi
+            (2nd ed., 2nd pt., 1886) (English translation, _History of
+            Jewish People in time of Jesus Christ_, Edinburgh, 1885);
+  Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu Christi (1903), 234, 241, 254
+              f., 287
+
+Schwartzkoppf. Die Weissagungen Jesu Christi von seinem Tode, seiner
+            Auferstehung und Wiederkunft und ihre Erfuellung (1895), 267
+
+Schweitzer, Albert. Das Messianitaetsund Leidensgeheimnis. Eine Skizze des
+            Lebens Jesu (Tuebingen, 1901), 281, 287, 328-330, 332 f., 336,
+            339 f., 351, 382 f.
+
+Schweizer, Alexander, 118, 127 f., 200, 219, 265
+
+Semler, Johann Salomo. Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten,
+            insbesondere vom Zweck Jesu und seiner Juenger (Halle, 1779),
+            13, 15, 25 f., 49
+
+Sepp, Johann Nepomuk. Das Leben Jesu Christi (Regensburg, 7 vols., 1st ed.
+            1843-1846, 2nd ed. 1853-1862), 108, 294
+
+Seydel, Rudolf. Das Evangelium Jesu in seinen Verhaeltnissen zur Buddha-
+            Saga und Buddha-Lehre (Leipzig, 1882);
+  Die Buddha-Legende und das Leben Jesu nach den Evangelien (2nd ed.
+              1897);
+  Buddha und Christus (Breslau, 1884), 269, 290-292
+
+Siegfried, Carl, 285
+
+Simon, Richard, 270
+
+Soden, Hermann Freiherr von. Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu (Berlin,
+            1904), 12, 293, 301-308, 312
+
+Stalker, J. The Life of Jesus Christ (Edinburgh, 1880) (German, Tuebingen,
+            1898), 217
+
+Stapfer, E. La Vie de Jesus (pt. i. 1896, pt. ii. 1897, pt. iii. 1898)
+            (English translation, _Jesus Christ before His Ministry_, by
+            L. S. Houghton, 1897, _Jesus Christ during His Ministry_, by
+            L. S. Houghton, 1897), 217
+
+Stave, 243
+
+Storr, 89
+
+Strauss, David Friedrich. Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der
+            Geschichte. Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu
+            (Berlin, 1865);
+  Das Leben Jesu (1st ed. 1835 and 1836, 2 vols., 3rd ed., revised, 1838
+              and 1839, 4th ed. 1840) (_The Life of Jesus Critically
+              Examined_, translated from the 4th German ed. by George
+              Eliot, London, 1846, 3rd ed. with a preface by Otto
+              Pfleiderer, 1898);
+  Das Leben Jesu fuer das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (Leipzig, 1864, 8th ed.)
+              (English translation, _A New Life of Jesus_, London, 1865),
+              4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 14, 24, 28, 35-37, 58, 60, 62, 65, 79 f.,
+              97 f., 68-121, 125, 129 f., 136, 138, 140, 145, 151, 153,
+              158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 166, 171, 173, 180 f., 182, 185,
+              188, 190, 193-199, 200, 201, 209 f., 214, 218, 221, 225,
+              229, 237, 252, 281, 294, 303, 309, 329, 331, 363
+
+Stricker. Jesus von Nazareth (1868), 202
+
+Tal, T., 286
+
+Tholuck, August. Die Glaubwuerdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte,
+            zugleich eine Kritik des Lebens Jesu von Strauss (Hamburg,
+            1837) (English translation, _The Credibility of the
+            Evangelical History, illustrated with reference to the
+            __"__Leben-Jesu__"__ of Dr. Strauss_, London, 1844), 70, 97,
+            100 f., 116, 119, 122, 139
+
+Titius, Arthur, 250
+
+Uhlhorn, Johann Gerhard Wilhelm. Das Leben Jesu in seinen neueren
+            Darstellungen. Vortraege (1892), 5, 11
+
+Ullmann, 100
+
+Usteri, 78
+
+Venturini, Karl Heinrich. Natuerliche Geschichte des grossen Propheten von
+            Nazareth (1st ed. 1800-1802, 2nd ed. 1806), 4, 38, 44, 45, 50,
+            59, 82, 162, 170, 299, 303, 313, 325, 327
+
+Veuillot, Louis. La Vie de notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (Paris, 1863),
+            (German by Waldener, Koeln-Neuss, 1864), 295
+
+Volkmar, Gustav. Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit, mit den
+            beiden ersten Erzaehlern (Zurich, 1882), 11, 210, 225-228, 233,
+            256, 301, 309, 313, 328
+
+Volz, Paul. Die juedische Eschatologie von Daniel bis Akiba (Tuebingen,
+            1903), 234
+
+Vossius, 270
+
+Wallon, H. Vie de notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (Paris, 1865), 295
+
+Walton, Brian, 270
+
+Weber, Ferdinand. System der altsynagogalen palaestinensischen Theologie
+            (Leipzig, 1880, 2nd ed. 1897), 269, 285 f.
+
+Weiffenbach, Wilhelm. Der Wiederkunftsgedanke Jesu (1873), 222, 228-233,
+            237, 250
+
+Weinel, Heinrich. Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1904), 12, 398
+
+Weiss, Bernhard. Das Leben Jesu (1st ed. 2 vols. 1882, 2nd ed. 1884)
+            (English translation, _The Life of Jesus_, by J. W. Hope,
+            Edinburgh, 1883), 10, 193, 216-218, 250, 262
+
+Weiss, Johannes. Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1st ed. 1892, 2nd ed.
+            1900), 9, 10, 11, 23, 61, 91, 92, 136, 221, 222, 237-240, 249
+            f., 256, 262, 265-267, 278, 301, 309, 336, 349, 383, 388
+
+Weisse, Christian Hermann. Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch und
+            philosophisch bearbeitet (2 vols., Leipzig, 1838);
+  Die Evangelienfrage in ihrem gegenwaertigen Stadium (Leipzig, 1856), 12,
+              118, 120, 121-136, 140, 162, 195, 198, 200, 204 f., 218,
+              229, 232, 294, 309, 328, 341, 357, 374, 378, 389
+
+Weitbrecht, M. G. Das Leben Jesu nach den vier Evangelien (1881), 217
+
+Weizsaecker, Karl Heinrich. Untersuchungen ueber die evangelische
+            Geschichte, ihre Quellen und den Gang ihrer Entwicklung
+            (Gotha, 1864), 190, 193, 200-202, 205, 207, 218, 229, 259
+
+Wellhausen, Julius. Israelitische und juedische Geschichte (3rd ed. 1897,
+            4th ed. 1902);
+  Das Evangelium Marci (1903);
+  Das Evangelium Matthaei (1904);
+  Das Evangelium Lucae (1904);
+  Skizzen und Vorarbeiten (1899), 254, 269, 276, 277, 285, 287, 289, 391
+
+Wendt, Hans Heinrich. Die Lehre Jesu (Goettingen, pt. i. 1886, pt. ii.
+            1890) (English translation, _The Teaching of Jesus_, by J.
+            Wilson, Edinburgh, 1892) (2nd German ed. 1902, 3rd ed. 1903),
+            219, 249, 265
+
+Wernle, Paul. Die Anfaenge unserer Religion (Tuebingen-Leipzig, 1901, 2nd
+            ed. 1904) (English translation, _The Beginnings of
+            Christianity_, by G. A. Bienemann, London, 1903);
+  Die Reichgotteshoffnung in den aeltesten christlichen Dokumenten und bei
+              Jesus (1903), 241, 252-254, 265, 267, 314, 398
+
+Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de, 72, 78, 86, 103, 119, 208
+
+Wettstein, Johann Jakob, 285
+
+Whateley, Richard. Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (London,
+            1819) (adapted as Das Leben Napoleons kritisch geprueft), 112
+
+Wieseler, Karl Georg. Chronologische Synopse der vier Evangelien (Hamburg,
+            1843), 117
+
+Wiesinger, Albert. Aphorismen gegen Renans Leben-Jesu (Vienna, 1864), 117,
+            190
+
+Widmanstadt, Joh. Alb., 270
+
+Wilke, Christian Gottlob. Tradition und Mythe (Leipzig, 1837);
+  Der Urevangelist (Dresden and Leipzig, 1838), 97, 112-114, 119, 121,
+              124, 140 f., 148, 195, 202, 225, 328
+
+Wittichen, Karl. Leben Jesu (Jena, 1876), 218
+
+Wrede, Wilhelm. Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien (Goettingen, 1901),
+            9, 11, 25, 131, 210, 221, 256, 257, 264, 309, 328-349, 350,
+            358, 380, 384 f., 389, 391 f., 399
+
+Wuensche, August. Neue Beitraege zur Erlaeuterung der Evangelien aus Talmud
+            und Midrasch (Goettingen, 1878);
+  Jesus in seiner Stellung zu den Frauen (1876), 269, 285 f.
+
+Xavier, Hieronymus. Historia Christi persice conscripta (Lugd. 1639), 14
+
+Ziegler, Heinrich. Der geschichtliche Christus (1891), 217
+
+Ziegler, Theobald, 69
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+    1 _Quoted by Dr. Inge in the Hibbert Journal for Jan. 1910, p. 438
+      (from __"__Jesus or Christ,__"__ p. 32)._
+
+    2 _"__Quest,__"__ p. 4._
+
+    3 An order founded in 1776 by Professor Adam Weishaupt of Ingolstadt
+      in Bavaria. Its aim was the furtherance of rational religion as
+      opposed to orthodox dogma; its organisation was largely modelled on
+      that of the Jesuits. At its most flourishing period it numbered over
+      2000 members, including the rulers of several German
+      States.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+    4 D. Fr. Strauss, _Gespraeche von Ulrich von Hutten_. Leipzig, 1860.
+
+    5 W. Wrede, _Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien_. (The Messianic
+      Secret in the Gospels.) Goettingen, 1901, pp. 280-282.
+
+    6 In the author's usage "the Marcan hypothesis" means the theory that
+      the Gospel of Mark is not only the earliest and most valuable source
+      for the facts, but differs from the other Gospels in embodying a
+      more or less clear and historically intelligible view of the
+      connexion of events. See Chaps. X. and XIV. below.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+    7 Dr. Christoph Friedrich von Ammon, _Fortbildung des Christentums_,
+      Leipzig, 1840, vol. iv. p. 156 ff.
+
+    8 Hase, _Geschichte Jesu_, Leipzig, 1876, pp. 110-162. The second
+      edition, published in 1891, carries the survey no further than the
+      first.
+
+    9 _Das Leben Jesu in seinen neueren Darstellungen_, 1892, five
+      lectures.
+
+   10 W. Frantzen, _Die __"__Leben-Jesu__"__ Bewegung seit Strauss_,
+      Dorpat, 1898.
+
+   11 _Theol. Rundschau_, ii. 59-67 (1899); iii. 9-19 (1900).
+
+   12 Von Soden's study, _Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu_, 1904,
+      belongs here only in a very limited sense, since it does not seek to
+      show how the problems have gradually emerged in the various Lives of
+      Jesus.
+
+   13 Hase, _Geschichte Jesu_, 1876, pp. 112, 113.
+
+   14 _Historia Christi persice conscripta simulque multis modis
+      contaminata a Hieronymo Xavier, lat. reddita et animadd, notata a
+      Ludovico de Dieu._ Lugd. 1639.
+
+   15 Johann Jakob Hess, _Geschichte der drei letzten Lebensjahre Jesu_.
+      (History of the Last Three Years of the Life of Jesus.) 3 vols. 1768
+      ff.
+
+   16 D. F. Strauss, _Hermann Samuel Reimarus und seine Schutzschrift fuer
+      die vernuenftigen Verehrer Gottes_. (Reimarus and his Apology for the
+      Rational Worshippers of God.) 1862.
+
+   17 The quotations inserted without special introduction are, of course,
+      from Reimarus. It is Dr. Schweitzer's method to lead up by a
+      paragraph of exposition to one of these characteristic
+      phrases.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   18 Otto Schmiedel, _Die Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung_.
+      Tuebingen, 1902.
+
+   19 Doederlein also wrote a defence of Jesus against the Fragmentist:
+      _Fragmente und Antifragmente_. Nuremberg, 1778.
+
+   20 This is perhaps the place to mention the account of the life of
+      Jesus which is given in the first part of Plank's _Geschichte des
+      Christentums_. Goettingen, 1818.
+
+   21 _Briefe das Studium der Theologie betreffend_, 1st ed., 1780-1781;
+      2nd ed., 1785-1786; _Werke_, ed. Suphan, vol. x.
+
+   22 A Life of Jesus which is completely dependent on the Commentaries of
+      Paulus is that of Greiling, superintendent at Aschersleben, _Das
+      Leben Jesu von Nazareth Ein religioeses Handbuch fuer Geist und Herz
+      der Freunde Jesu unter den Gebildeten._ (The Life of Jesus of
+      Nazareth, a religious Handbook for the Minds and Hearts of the
+      Friends of Jesus among the Cultured.) Halle, 1813.
+
+   23 Paulus prided himself on a very exact acquaintance with the physical
+      and geographical conditions of Palestine. He had a wide knowledge of
+      the literature of Eastern travel.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   24 This interpretation, it ought to be remarked, seems to be implied by
+      the ancient reading. "Few things are needful, or one," given in the
+      margin of the Revised Version.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   25 Associations of students, at that time of a political
+      character.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   26 The ground of the inference is that, according to this theory, they
+      did not attach much importance to the keeping of the Feasts at
+      Jerusalem. Dr. Schweitzer reminds us in a footnote that a certain
+      want of clearness is due to the fact of this work having been
+      compiled from lecture-notes.
+
+   27 See Theobald Ziegler, "Zur Biographie von David Friedrich Strauss"
+      (Materials for the Biography of D. F. S.), in the _Deutsche Revue_,
+      May, June, July 1905. The hitherto unpublished letters to Binder
+      throw some light on the development of Strauss during the formative
+      years before the publication of the Life of Jesus.
+
+      Binder, later Director of the Board of Studies at Stuttgart, was the
+      friend who delivered the funeral allocution at the grave of Strauss.
+      This last act of friendship exposed him to enmity and calumny of all
+      kinds. For the text of his short address, see the _Deutsche Revue_,
+      1905, p. 107.
+
+   28 _Deutsche Revue_, May 1905, p. 199.
+
+   29 _Ibid._ p. 201.
+
+   30 _Deutsche Revue_, p. 203.
+
+   31 Assistant lecturer.
+
+   32 _Ibid._, June 1905, p. 343 ff.
+
+   33 See Hase, _Leben Jesu_, 1876, p. 124. The "text-book" referred to is
+      Hase's first Life of Jesus.
+
+   34 He to whom my plaint is
+      Knows I shed no tear;
+      She to whom I say this
+      Feels I have no fear.
+
+      Time has come for fading,
+      Like a glimmering ray,
+      Or a sense-evading
+      Strain that floats away.
+
+      May, though fainter, dimmer,
+      Only, clear and pure,
+      To the last the glimmer
+      And the strain endure.
+
+      The persons alluded to in the first verse are his son, who, as a
+      physician, attended him in his illness, and to whom he was deeply
+      attached, and a very old friend to whom the verses were
+      addressed.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   35 2 Kings iv. 42-44.
+
+   36 _Probabilia de evangelii et epistolarum Ioannis Apostoli indole et
+      origine eruditorum iudiciis modeste subjecit C. Th. Bretschneider._
+      Leipzig, 1820.
+
+   37 Dr. Fr. Schleiermacher, _Ueber die Schriften des Lukas. Ein
+      kritischer Versuch._ (The Writings of Luke. A critical essay.) C.
+      Reimer, Berlin, 1817.
+
+   38 Koppe, _Marcus non epitomator Matthaei_, 1782.
+
+   39 Storr, _De Fontibus Evangeliorum Mt. et Lc._, 1794.
+
+   40 Gratz, _Neuer Versuch, die Entstehung der drei ersten Evangelien zu
+      erklaeren_, 1812.
+
+   41 _V. sup._ p. 35 f. For the earlier history of the question see F. C.
+      Baur, _Krit. Untersuch. ueber die kanonischen Evangelien_, Tuebingen,
+      1847, pp. 1-76.
+
+   42 So called because largely based on the reference in Luke i. 1, to
+      the "many" who had "taken in hand to draw up a narrative
+      ({~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~})."--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   43 We take the translation of this striking image from Sanday's "Survey
+      of the Synoptic Question," _The Expositor_, 4th ser. vol. 3, p. 307.
+
+   44 For general title see above. First part: "Herr Dr. Steudel, or the
+      Self-deception of the Intellectual Supernaturalism of our Time." 182
+      pp. Second part: "Die Herren Eschenmayer und Menzel." 247 pp. Third
+      part: "_Die evangelische Kirchenzeitung_, _die Jahrbuecher fuer
+      wissenschaftliche Kritik_ und _Die theologischen Studien und
+      Kritiken_ in ihrer Stellung zu meiner Kritik des Lebens Jesu." (The
+      attitude taken up by ... in regard to my critical Life of Jesus.)
+      179 pp. In the _Studien und Kritiken_ two reviews had appeared: a
+      critical review by Dr. Ullmann (vol. for 1836, pp. 770-816) and that
+      of Mueller, written from the standpoint of the "common faith" (vol.
+      for 1836, pp. 816-890). In the _Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_ the
+      articles referred to are the following: _Vorwort_ (Editorial
+      Survey), 1836, pp. 1-6, 9-14, 17-23, 25-31, 33-38, 41-45; "The
+      Future of our Theology" (1836, pp. 281 ff.); "Thoughts suggested by
+      Dr. Strauss's essay on 'The Relation of Theological Criticism and
+      Speculation to the Church' " (1836, pp. 382 ff.); Strauss's essay
+      had appeared in the _Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung_ for 1836, No. 39.
+      "_Die kritische Bearbeitung des Lebens Jesu von D. F. Strauss nach
+      ihrem wissenschaftlichen Werte beleuchtet_" (An Inquiry into the
+      Scientific Value of D. F. Strauss's Critical Study of the Life of
+      Jesus.) By Prof. Dr. Harless. Erlangen, 1836.
+
+   45 "Everything turns to the advantage of the elect, even to the
+      obscurities of scripture, for they treat them with reverence because
+      of its perspicuities; everything turns to the disadvantage of the
+      reprobate, even to the perspicuities of scripture, for they
+      blaspheme them because they cannot understand its obscurities." For
+      the title of Harless's essay, see end of previous note.
+
+   46 _Das Leben-Jesu kritisch bearbeitet von Dr. D. F. Strauss. Geprueft
+      fuer Theologen und Nicht-Theologen_, von Wilhelm Hoffmann. 1836.
+      (Strauss's Critical Study of the Life of Jesus examined for the
+      Benefit of Theologians and non-Theologians.)
+
+   47 _Apologie des Lebens Jesu gegenueber dem neuesten Versuch, es in
+      Mythen aufzuloesen._ (Defence of the Life of Jesus against the latest
+      attempt to resolve it into myth.) By Joh. Ernst Osiander, Professor
+      at the Evangelical Seminary at Maulbronn.
+
+   48 _Ueber das Leben-Jesu von Strauss_, von Franz Baader, 1836. Here may
+      be mentioned also the lectures which Krabbe (subsequently Professor
+      at Rostock) delivered against Strauss: _Vorlesungen ueber das Leben-
+      Jesu fuer Theologen und Nicht-Theologen_ (Lectures on the Life of
+      Jesus for Theologians and non-Theologians), Hamburg, 1839. They are
+      more tolerable to non-theologians than to theologians. The author at
+      a later period distinguished himself by the fanatical zeal with
+      which he urged on the deposition of his colleague, Michael
+      Baumgarten, whose _Geschichte Jesu_, published in 1859, though fully
+      accepting the miracles, was weighed in the balance by Krabbe and
+      found light-weight by the Rostock standard.
+
+   49 For the title, see head of chapter. Tholuck was born in 1799 at
+      Breslau, and became in 1826 Professor at Halle, where he worked
+      until his death in 1877. With the possible exception of Neander, he
+      was the most distinguished representative of the mediating theology.
+      His piety was deep and his learning was wide, but his judgment went
+      astray in the effort to steer his freight of pietism safely between
+      the rocks of rationalism and the shoals of orthodoxy.
+
+   50 _Stud. u. Krit._, 1836, p. 777. In his "Open letter to Dr. Ullmann,"
+      Strauss examines this suggestion in a serious and dignified fashion,
+      and shows that nothing would be gained by such
+      expedients.--_Streitschriften_, 3rd pt., p. 129 ff.
+
+   51 _Das Leben Jesu-Christi._ Hamburg, 1837. Aug. Wilhelm Neander was
+      born in 1789 at Goettingen, of Jewish parents, his real name being
+      David Mendel. He was baptized in 1806, studied theology, and in 1813
+      was appointed to a professorship in Berlin, where he displayed a
+      many-sided activity and exercised a beneficent influence. He died in
+      1850. The best-known of his writings is the _Geschichte der
+      Pflanzung und Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel_
+      (History of the Propagation and Administration of the Christian
+      Church by the Apostles), Hamburg, 1832-1833, of which a reprint
+      appeared as late as 1890. Neander was a man not only of deep piety,
+      but also of great solidity of character.
+
+      Strauss, in his Life of Jesus of 1864, passes the following judgment
+      upon Neander's work: "A book such as in these circumstances
+      Neander's Life of Jesus was bound to be calls forth our sympathy;
+      the author himself acknowledges in his preface that it bears upon it
+      only too clearly the marks of the time of crisis, division, pain,
+      and distress in which it was produced."
+
+      Of the innumerable "positive" Lives of Jesus which appeared about
+      the end of the 'thirties we may mention that of Julius Hartmann (2
+      vols., 1837-1839). Among the later Lives of Jesus of the mediating
+      theology may be mentioned that of Theodore Pressel of Tuebingen,
+      which was much read at the time of its appearance (1857, 592 pp.).
+      It aims primarily at edification. We may also mention the _Leben des
+      Herrn Jesu Christi_ by Wil. Jak. Lichtenstein (Erlangen, 1856),
+      which reflects the ideas of von Hofmann.
+
+   52 For title see head of chapter.
+
+   53 _Aphorismen zur Apologie des Dr. Strauss und seines Werkes._ Grimma,
+      1838.
+
+   54 From the _Xame Xenien_, p. 259 of Goethe's Works, ed. Hempel.
+
+   55 _Die Wissenschaft und die Kirche. Zur Verstaendigung ueber die
+      Straussische Angelegenheit._ (A contribution to the adjustment of
+      opinion regarding the Strauss affair.) By Daniel Schenkel,
+      Licentiate in Theology and Privat-Docent of the University of Basle,
+      with a dedicatory letter to Herr Dr. Luecke, Konsistorialrat. Basle,
+      1839.
+
+   56 _Dr. Strauss und die Zuericher Kirche. Eine Stimme aus
+      Norddeutschland. Mit einer Vorrede von Dr. W. M. L. de Wette._ (A
+      voice from North Germany. With an introduction by Dr. W. M. L. de
+      Wette.) Basle, 1839.
+
+   57 _Ueber theologische Lehrfreiheit und Lehrerwahl fuer Hochschulen._
+      Zurich, 1839.
+
+   58 For full title see head of chapter. Reference may also be made to
+      the same author's _Fortbildung des Christentums zur Weltreligion_.
+      (Development of Christianity into a World-religion.) Leipzig,
+      1833-1835. 4 vols. Ammon was born in 1766 at Bayreuth; became
+      Professor of theology at Erlangen in 1790; was Professor in
+      Goettingen from 1794 to 1804, and, after being back in Erlangen in
+      the meantime, became in 1813 Senior Court Chaplain and
+      "Oberkonsistorialrat" at Dresden, where he died in 1850. He was the
+      most distinguished representative of historico-critical rationalism.
+
+   59 He is at one with Strauss in rejecting the explanation of this
+      miracle on the analogy of an expedited natural process, to which
+      Hase had pointed, and which was first suggested by Augustine in
+      _Tract viii. in Ioann._: "That Christ changed water into wine is
+      nothing wonderful to those who consider the works of God. What was
+      there done in the water-pots, God does yearly in the vine."
+      [Augustine's words are: Miraculum quidem Domini nostri Jesu Christi,
+      quo de aqua vinum fecit, non est mirum eis qui noverunt quia Deus
+      fecit (_i.e._ that He who did it was God). Ipse enim fecit vinum
+      illo die ... in sex hydriis, qui omni anno facit hoc in vitibus.]
+      Nevertheless the poorest naturalistic explanation is at least better
+      than the resignation of Luecke, who is content to wait "until it
+      please God through the further progress of Christian thought and
+      life to bring about the solution of this riddle in its natural and
+      historical aspects." Luecke, _Johannes-Kommentar_, p. 474 ff.
+
+   60 Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg was born in 1802 at Froendenberg in the
+      "county" (_Grafschaft_) of Mark, became Professor of Theology in
+      Berlin in 1826, and died there in 1869. He founded the _Evangelische
+      Kirchenzeitung_ in 1827.
+
+   61 _Bericht ueber des Herrn Dr. Strauss' historische Bearbeitung des
+      Lebens Jesu._
+
+   62 _Dr. Strauss' Leben-Jesu aus dem Standpunkt des Catholicismus
+      betrachtet._
+
+   63 Johann Leonhard Hug was born in 1765 at Constance, and had been
+      since 1791 Professor of New Testament Theology at Freiburg, where he
+      died in 1846. He had a wide knowledge of his own department of
+      theology, and his Introduction to the New Testament Writings won him
+      some reputation among Protestant theologians also.
+
+   64 Among the Catholic "Leben-Jesu," of which the authors found their
+      incentive in the desire to oppose Strauss, the first place belongs
+      to that of Kuhn of Tuebingen. Unfortunately only the first volume
+      appeared (1838, 488 pp.). Here there is a serious and scholarly
+      attempt to grapple with the problems raised by Strauss. Of less
+      importance is the work of the same title in seven volumes, by the
+      Munich Priest and Professor of History, Nepomuk Sepp (1843-1846; 2nd
+      ed. 1853-1862).
+
+   65 _Ueber das Leben-Jesu von Doctor Strauss._ By Edgar Quinet.
+      Translated from the French by Georg Kleine. Published by J. Erdmann
+      and C. C. Mueller, 1839. In 1840 Strauss's book was translated into
+      French by M. Littre. It failed, however, to exercise any influence
+      upon French theology or literature. Strauss is one of those German
+      thinkers who always remain foreign and unintelligible to the French
+      mind. Could Renan have written his Life of Jesus as he did if he had
+      had even a partial understanding of Strauss?
+
+   66 Anna Katharina Emmerich was born in 1774 at Flamske near Coesfeld.
+      Her parents were peasants. In 1803 she took up her abode with the
+      Augustinian nuns of the convent of Agnetenberg at Duelmen. After the
+      dissolution of the convent, she lived in a single room in Duelmen
+      itself. The "stigmata" showed themselves first in 1812. She died on
+      the 9th of February 1824. Brentano had been in her neighbourhood
+      since 1819. _Das bittere Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi_ (The
+      Bitter Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ) was issued by Brentano
+      himself in 1834. The _Life of Jesus_ was published on the basis of
+      notes left by him--he died in 1842--in three volumes, 1858-1860, at
+      Regensburg, under the sanction of the Bishop of Limberg.
+
+      First volume.--From the death of St. Joseph to the end of the first
+      year after the Baptism of Jesus in Jordan. Communicated between May
+      1, 1821, and October 1, 1822.
+
+      Second volume.--From the beginning of the second year after the
+      Baptism in Jordan to the close of the second Passover in Jerusalem.
+      Communicated between October 1, 1822, and April 30, 1823.
+
+      Third volume.--From the close of the second Passover in Jerusalem to
+      the Mission of the Holy Spirit. Communicated between October 21,
+      1823, and January 8, 1824, and from July 29, 1820, to May 1821.
+
+      Both works have been frequently reissued, the "Bitter Sufferings" as
+      late as 1894.
+
+   67 _Auszuege aus der Schrift __"__Das Leben Luthers kritisch
+      bearbeitet.__"_ (Extracts from a work entitled "A Critical Study of
+      the Life of Luther.") By Dr. Casuar ("Cassowary"; Strauss =
+      Ostrich). Mexico, 1836. Edited by Julius Ferdinand Wurm.
+
+   68 _Das Leben Napoleons kritisch geprueft._ (A Critical Examination of
+      the Life of Napoleon.) From the English, with some pertinent
+      applications to Strauss's Life of Jesus, 1836. [The English original
+      referred to seems to have been Whateley's _Historic Doubts relative
+      to Napoleon Bonaparte_, published in 1819, and primarily directed
+      against Hume's _Essay on Miracles_.--TRANSLATOR.]
+
+   69 _La Vie de Strauss. Ecrite en l'an 1839._ Paris, 1839.
+
+   70 Ch. G. Wilke, _Tradition und Mythe_. A contribution to the
+      historical criticism of the Gospels in general, and in particular to
+      the appreciation of the treatment of myth and idealism in Strauss's
+      "Life of Jesus." Leipzig, 1837.
+
+      Christian Gottlob Wilke was born in 1786 at Werm, near Zeitz,
+      studied theology and became pastor of Hermannsdorf in the
+      Erzgebirge. He resigned this office in 1837 in order to devote
+      himself to his studies, perhaps also because he had become conscious
+      of an inner unrest. In 1845 he prepared the way for his conversion
+      to Catholicism by publishing a work entitled "Can a Protestant go
+      over to the Roman Church with a good conscience?" He took the
+      decisive step in August 1846. Later he removed to Wuerzburg.
+      Subsequently he recast his famous _Clavis Novi Testamenti
+      Philologica_--which had appeared in 1840-1841--in the form of a
+      lexicon for Catholic students of theology. His _Hermeneutik des
+      Neuen Testaments_, published in 1843-1844, appeared in 1853 as
+      _Biblische Hermeneutik nach katholischen Grundsaetzen_ (The Science
+      of Biblical Interpretation according to Catholic principles). He was
+      engaged in recasting his Clavis when he died in 1854.
+
+      Of later works dealing with the question of myth, we may refer to
+      Emanuel Marius, _Die Persoenlichkeit Jesu mit besonderer Ruecksicht
+      auf die Mythologien und Mysterien der alten Voelker_ (The Personality
+      of Jesus, with special reference to the Mythologies and Mysteries of
+      Ancient Nations), Leipzig, 1879, 395 pp.; and Otto Frick, _Mythus
+      und Evangelium_ (Myth and Gospel), Heilbronn, 1879, 44 pp.
+
+   71 See p. 89 above.
+
+   72 _Streitschriften._ Drittes Heft, pp. 55-126: _Die Jahrbuecher fuer
+      wissenschaftliche Kritik_: i. _Allgemeines Verhaeltnis der
+      Hegel'schen Philosophie zur theologischen Kritik_: ii. _Hegels
+      Ansicht ueber den historischen Wert der evangelischen Geschichte_
+      (Hegel's View of the Historical Value of the Gospel History); iii.
+      _Verschiedene Richtungen innerhalb der Hegel'schen Schule in Betreff
+      der Christologie_ (Various Tendencies within the Hegelian School in
+      regard to Christology). 1837.
+
+   73 _Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte._ (Scientific
+      Criticism of the Gospel History.) August Ebrard. Frankfort, 1842;
+      3rd ed., 1868.
+
+      Johannes Heinrich Aug. Ebrard was born in 1818 at Erlangen, was,
+      first, Professor of Reformed Theology at Zurich and Erlangen,
+      afterwards (1853) went to Speyer as "Konsistorialrat," but was
+      unable to cope with the Liberal opposition there, and returned in
+      1861 to Erlangen, where he died in 1888.
+
+      A characteristic example of Ebrard's way of treating the subject is
+      his method of meeting the objection that a fish with a piece of
+      money in its jaws could not have taken the hook. "The fish might
+      very well," he explains, "have thrown up the piece of money from its
+      belly into the opening of the jaws in the moment in which Peter
+      opened its mouth." Upon this Strauss remarks: "The inventor of this
+      argument tosses it down before us as who should say, 'I know very
+      well it is bad, but it is good enough for you, at any rate so long
+      as the Church has livings to distribute and we Konsistorialrats have
+      to examine the theological candidates.' " Strauss, therefore,
+      characterises Ebrard's Life of Jesus as "Orthodoxy restored on a
+      basis of impudence." The pettifogging character of this work made a
+      bad impression even in Conservative quarters.
+
+   74 _Chronologische Synopse der vier Evangelien._ (Chronological
+      Synopsis of the four Gospels.) By Karl Georg Wieseler. Hamburg,
+      1843. Wieseler was born in 1813 at Altencelle (Hanover), and was
+      Professor successively at Goettingen, Kiel, and Greifswald. He died
+      in 1883.
+
+   75 Johann Peter Lange, Pastor in Duisburg, afterwards Professor at
+      Zurich in place of Strauss. _Das Leben Jesu._ 5 vols., 1844-1847.
+
+   76 Georg Heinrich August Ewald, _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_.
+      (History of the People of Israel.) 7 vols. Goettingen, 1843-1859; 3rd
+      ed., 1864-1870. Fifth vol., _Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit_.
+      (History of Christ and His Times.) 1855; 2nd ed., 1857.
+
+      Ewald was born in 1803 at Goettingen, where in 1827 he was appointed
+      Professor of Oriental Languages. Having made a protest against the
+      repeal of the fundamental law of the Hanoverian Constitution he was
+      removed from his office and went to Tuebingen, first as Professor of
+      philology; in 1841 he was transferred to the theological faculty. In
+      1848 he returned to Goettingen. When, in 1866, he refused to take the
+      oath of allegiance to the King of Prussia, he was compulsorily
+      retired, and, in consequence of imprudent expressions of opinion,
+      was also deprived of the right to lecture. The town of Hanover chose
+      him as its representative in the North German and in the German
+      Reichstag, where he sat among the Guelph opposition, in the middle
+      of the centre party. He died in 1875 at Goettingen. His contributions
+      to New Testament studies were much inferior to his Oriental and Old
+      Testament researches. His Life of Jesus, in particular, is
+      worthless, in spite of the Old Testament and Oriental learning with
+      which it was furnished forth. He lays great stress upon making the
+      genitive of "Christus" not "Christi," but, according to German
+      inflection, "Christus'."
+
+   77 Ammon, _Johannem evangelii auctorem ab editore huius libri fuisse
+      diversum_, Erlangen, 1811.
+
+   78 No value whatever can be ascribed to the Life of Jesus by Werner
+      Hahn, Berlin, 1844, 196 pp. The "didactic presentation of the
+      history" which the author offers is not designed to meet the demands
+      of historical criticism. He finds in the Gospels no bare history,
+      but, above all, the inculcation of the principle of love. He casts
+      to the winds all attempt to draw the portrait of Jesus as a true
+      historian, being only concerned with its inner truth and "idealises
+      artistically and scientifically" the actual course of the outward
+      life of Jesus. "It is never the business of a history," he explains,
+      "to relate only the bare truth. It belongs to a mere planless and
+      aimless chronicle to relate everything that happened in such a way
+      that its words are a mere slavish reflection of the outward course
+      of events."
+
+   79 Hase, _Geschichte Jesu_, 1876, p. 128.
+
+   80 _Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christentums._
+      Leipzig, 1855-1862.
+
+   81 At the end of his preface he makes the striking remark: "I confess I
+      cannot conceive of any possible way by which Christianity can take
+      on a form which will make it once more the truth for our time,
+      without having recourse to the aid of philosophy; and I rejoice to
+      believe that this opinion is shared by many of the ablest and most
+      respected of present-day theologians."
+
+   82 Vol. ii. pp. 438-543. _Philosophische Schlussbetrachtung ueber die
+      religioese Bedeutung der Persoenlichkeit Christi und der evangelischen
+      Ueberlieferung._ (Concluding Philosophical Estimate of the
+      Significance of the Person of Christ and of the Gospel Tradition.)
+
+   83 Christian Gottlob Wilke, formerly pastor of Hermannsdorf in the
+      Erzgebirge. _Der Urevangelist, oder eine exegetisch-kritische
+      Untersuchung des Verwandschaftsverhaeltnisses der drei ersten
+      Evangelien._ (The Earliest Evangelist, a Critical and Exegetical
+      Inquiry into the Relationship of the First Three Gospels.) The
+      subsequent course of the discussion of the Marcan hypothesis was as
+      follows:--
+
+      In answer to Wilke there appeared a work signed Philosophotos
+      Aletheias, _Die Evangelien, ihr Geist, ihre Verfasser, und ihr
+      Verhaeltnis zu einander_. (The Gospels, their Spirit, their Authors,
+      and their relation to one another.) Leipzig, 1845, 440 pp. The
+      author sees in Paul the evil genius of early Christianity, and
+      thinks that the work of scientific criticism must be directed to
+      detecting and weeding out the Pauline elements in the Gospels. Luke
+      is in his opinion a party-writing, biased by Paulinism; in fact Paul
+      had a share in its preparation, and this is what Paul alludes to
+      when he speaks in Romans ii. 16, xi. 28, and xvi. 25 of "his"
+      Gospel. His hand is especially recognisable in chapters i.-iii.,
+      vii., ix., xi., xviii., xx., xxi., and xxiv. Mark consists of
+      extracts from Matthew and Luke; John presupposes the other three.
+      The Tuebingen standpoint was set forth by Baur in his work,
+      _Kritische Untersuchungen ueber die kanonischen Evangelien_. (A
+      Critical Examination of the Canonical Gospels.) Tuebingen, 1847, 622
+      pp. According to him Mark is based on Matthew and Luke. At the same
+      time, however, the irreconcilability of the Fourth Gospel with the
+      Synoptists is for the first time fully worked out, and the
+      refutation of its historical character is carried into detail.
+
+      The order Matthew, Mark, Luke is defended by Adolf Hilgenfeld in his
+      work _Die Evangelien_. Leipzig, 1854, 355 pp.
+
+      Karl Reinhold Koestlin's work, _Der Ursprung und die Komposition der
+      synoptischen Evangelien_ (Origin and Composition of the Synoptic
+      Gospels), is rendered nugatory by obscurities and compromises.
+      Stuttgart, 1853, 400 pp. The priority of Mark is defended by Edward
+      Reuss, _Die Geschichte der heiligen Schriften des Neuen Testaments_
+      (History of the Sacred Writings of the New Testament), 1842; H.
+      Ewald, _Die drei ersten Evangelien_, 1850; A. Ritschl, _Die
+      Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche_ (Origin of the ancient
+      Catholic Church), 1850; A. Reville, _Etudes critiques sur l'Evangile
+      selon St. Matthieu_, 1862. In 1863 the foundations of the Marcan
+      hypothesis were relaid, more firmly than before, by Holtzmann's
+      work, _Die synoptischen Evangelien_. Leipzig, 1863, 514 pp.
+
+   84 Alexander Schweizer, _Das Evangelium Johannis nach seinem inneren
+      Werte and seiner Bedeutung fuer das Leben Jesu kritisch untersucht_.
+      1841. (A Critical Examination of the Intrinsic Value of the Gospel
+      of John and of its Importance as a Source for the Life of Jesus.)
+      Alexander Schweizer was born in 1808 at Murten, was appointed
+      Professor of Pastoral Theology at Zurich in 1835, and continued to
+      lecture there until his death in 1888, remaining loyal to the ideas
+      of his teacher Schleiermacher, though handling them with a certain
+      freedom. His best-known work is his _Glaubenslehre_ (System of
+      Doctrine), 2 vols., 1863-1872; 2nd ed., 1877.
+
+   85 The German is _Mirakeln_, the usual word being _Wunder_, which,
+      though constantly used in the sense of actual "miracles," has, from
+      its obvious derivation, a certain ambiguity.
+
+   86 "And the glory of the Lord abode upon Mount Sinai, and the cloud
+      covered it six days."
+
+   87 We subjoin the titles of the divisions of this work, which are of
+      some interest:
+
+      Vol. i. Book  i. The Sources of the Gospel History.
+      Vol. i. Book ii. The Legends of the Childhood.
+      Vol. i. Book iii. General Sketch of the Gospel History.
+      Vol. i. Book iv. The Incidents and Discourses according to Mark.
+      Vol. ii. Book v. The Incidents and Discourses according to Matthew
+      and Luke.
+      Vol. ii. Book vi. The Incidents and Discourses according to John.
+      Vol. ii. Book vii. The Resurrection and the Ascension.
+      Vol. ii. Book viii. Concluding Philosophical Exposition of the
+      Significance of the Person of Christ and of the Gospel Tradition.
+
+   88 _Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit._ (History of Christ and His
+      Times.) By Heinrich Ewald, Goettingen, 1855, 450 pp.
+
+   89 _Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung._
+
+   90 _Das entdeckte Christentum._ See also _Die gute Sache der Freiheit
+      und meine eigene Angelegenheit_. (The Good Cause of Freedom, in
+      Connexion with my own Case.) Zurich, 1843.
+
+   91 _Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes._
+
+   92 Here and elsewhere Bauer seems to use "Christologie" in the sense of
+      Messianic doctrine, rather than in the more general sense which is
+      usual in theology.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+   93 We retain the German phrase, which has naturalised itself in
+      Synoptic criticism as the designation of an assumed primary gospel
+      lying behind the canonical Mark.
+
+   94 _Kritik der Paulinischen Briefe._ (Criticism of the Pauline
+      Epistles.) Berlin, 1850-1852.
+
+   95 _Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs._ (Criticism
+      of the Gospels and History of their Origin.) 2 vols., Berlin,
+      1850-1851.
+
+   96 _Christus und die Caesaren. Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem
+      roemischen Griechentum._ Berlin, 1877.
+
+   97 Hennell, a London merchant, withdrew himself from his business
+      pursuits for two years in order to make the preparatory studies for
+      this Life of Jesus. [He is best known as a friend of George Eliot,
+      who was greatly interested and influenced by the
+      "Inquiry."--TRANSLATOR.] To the same category as Hennell's work
+      belongs the _Wohlgepruefte Darstellung des Lebens Jesu_ (An Account
+      of the Life of Jesus based on the closest Examination) of the
+      Heidelberg mathematician, Karl von Langsdorf, Mannheim, 1831.
+      Supplement, with preface to a future second edition, 1833.
+
+   98 Hase seems not to have recognised that the "Disclosures" were merely
+      a plagiarism from Venturini. He mentions them in connexion with
+      Bruno Bauer and appears to make him responsible for inspiring them;
+      at least that is suggested by his formula of transition when he
+      says: "It was primarily to him that the frivolous apocryphal
+      hypotheses attached themselves." This is quite inaccurate. The
+      anonymous epitomist of Venturini had nothing to do with Bauer, and
+      had probably not read a line of his work. Venturini, whom he had
+      read, he does not name.
+
+   99 One of the most ingenious of the followers of Venturini was the
+      French Jew Salvator. In his _Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine_ (Paris, 2
+      vols., 1838), he seeks to prove that Jesus was the last
+      representative of a mysticism which, drawing its nutriment from the
+      other Oriental religions, was to be traced among the Jews from the
+      time of Solomon onwards. In Jesus this mysticism allied itself with
+      Messianic enthusiasm. After He had lost consciousness upon the cross
+      He was succoured by Joseph of Arimathea and Pilate's wife, contrary
+      to His own expectation and purpose. He ended His days among the
+      Essenes.
+
+      Salvator looks to a spiritualised mystical Mosaism as destined to be
+      the successful rival of Christianity.
+
+  100 The reference should be Micah iv. 8.--F. C. B.
+
+  101 "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint."--Mephistopheles in _Faust_.
+
+  102 _Aus der Jordanwiege nach Golgatha; vier Buecher ueber das Evangelium
+      und die Evangelien._
+
+  103 _Die Geschichte Jesu auf Grund freier geschichtlicher Untersuchungen
+      ueber das Evangelium and die Evangelien._
+
+  104 For Noack's reconstruction of it see Book iii. pp. 196-225.
+
+  105 For the reconstruction see Book iii. pp. 326-386.
+
+  106 _Tharraqah und Sunamith._ The Song of Solomon in its historical and
+      topographical setting. 1869.
+
+  107 _La Vie de Jesus de D. Fr. Strauss._ Traduite par M. Littre, 1840.
+
+  108 Bruno Bauer in _Philo, Strauss, und Renan_.
+
+  109 Renan does not hesitate to apply this tasteless parallel.
+
+  110 Charles Emile Freppel (Abbe), Professeur d'eloquence sacree a la
+      Sorbonne. _Examen critique de la vie de Jesus de M. Renan._ Paris,
+      1864. 148 pp.
+
+      Henri Lasserre's pamphlet, _L'Evangile selon Renan_ (The Gospel
+      according to Renan), reached its four-and-twentieth edition in the
+      course of the same year.
+
+  111 _Lettre pastorale de Monseigneur l'Archeveque de Paris (Georges
+      Darboy) sur la divinite de Jesus-Christ, et mandement pour le careme
+      de 1864._
+
+  112 See, for example, Felix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup, Bishop of
+      Orleans, _Avertissement a la jeunesse et aux peres de famille sur
+      les attaques dirigees contre la religion par quelques ecrivains de
+      nos jours._ (Warning to the Young, and to Fathers of Families,
+      concerning some Attacks directed against Religion by some Writers of
+      our Time.) Paris, 1864. 141 pp.
+
+  113 Amadee Nicolas, _Renan et sa vie de Jesus sous les rapports moral,
+      legal, et litteraire. Appel a la raison et la conscience du monde
+      civilise._ Paris-Marseille, 1864.
+
+  114 Ernest Havet, Professeur au College de France, _Jesus dans
+      l'histoire_. _Examen de la vie de Jesus par M. Renan._ Extrait de la
+      _Revue des deux mondes_. Paris, 1863. 71 pp.
+
+  115 _Zwei franzoesische Stimmen ueber Renans Leben-Jesu, von Edmond
+      Scherer und Athanase Coquerel, d.J. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis des
+      franzoesischen Protestantismus._ Regensburg, 1864. (Two French
+      utterances in regard to Renan's Life of Jesus, by Edmond Scherer and
+      Athanase Coquerel the younger. A contribution to the understanding
+      of French Protestantism.)
+
+  116 E. de Pressense, _L'Ecole critique et Jesus-Christ, a propos de la
+      vie de Jesus de M. Renan_.
+
+  117 E. de Pressense, _Jesus-Christ, son temps, sa vie, son oeuvre_.
+      Paris, 1865. 684 pp. In general the plan of this work follows
+      Renan's. He divides the Life of Jesus into three periods: i. The
+      Time of Public Favour; ii. The Period of Conflict; iii. The Great
+      Week. Death and Victory. By way of introduction there is a long
+      essay on the supernatural which sets forth the supernaturalistic
+      views of the author.
+
+  118 _La Vie de Jesus de Renan devant les orthodoxes et devant la
+      critique._ 1864.
+
+  119 T. Colani, Pasteur, "Examen de la vie de Jesus de M. Renan," _Revue
+      de theologie_. Issued separately, Strasbourg-Paris, 1864. 74 pp.
+
+  120 Lasserre, _Das Evangelium nach Renan_. Munich, 1864.
+
+      Freppel, _Kritische Beleuchtung der E. Renan'schen Schrift_.
+      Translated by Kallmus. Vienna, 1864.
+
+      See also Lamy, Professor of the Theological Faculty of the Catholic
+      University of Louvain, _Renans Leben-Jesu vor dem Richterstuhle der
+      Kritik_. (Renan's Life of Jesus before the Judgment Seat of
+      Criticism.) Translated by August Rohling, Priest. Muenster, 1864.
+
+  121 Dr. Michelis, _Renans Roman vom Leben Jesu_. _Eine deutsche Antwort
+      auf eine franzoesische Blasphemie._ (Renan's Romance on the Life of
+      Jesus. A German answer to a French blasphemy.) Muenster, 1864.
+
+      Dr. Sebastian Brunner, _Der Atheist Renan und sein Evangelium_. (The
+      Atheist Renan and his Gospel.) Regensburg, 1864.
+
+      Albert Wiesinger, _Aphorismen gegen Renans Leben-Jesu_. Vienna,
+      1864.
+
+      Dr. Martin Deutlinger, _Renan und das Wunder_. (Renan and Miracle. A
+      contribution to Christian Apologetic.) Munich, 1864. 159 pp.
+
+      Dr. Daniel Bonifacius Haneberg, _Ernest Renans Leben-Jesu_.
+      Regensburg, 1864.
+
+  122 Willibald Beyschlag, Doctor and Professor of Theology, _Ueber das
+      Leben-Jesu von Renan_. A Lecture delivered at Halle, January 13,
+      1864. Berlin.
+
+  123 Chr. Ernst Luthardt, Doctor and Professor of Theology, _Die modernen
+      Darstellungen des Lebens Jesu_. (Modern Presentations of the Life of
+      Jesus.) A discussion of the writings of Strauss, Renan, and
+      Schenkel, and of the essays of Coquerel the younger, Scherer,
+      Colani, and Keim. A Lecture. Leipzig, 1864.
+
+      Of the remaining Protestant polemics we may name:--
+
+      Dr. Hermann Gerlach, _Gegen Renans Leben-Jesu 1864_. Berlin.
+
+      Br. Lehmann, _Renan wider Renan_. (Renan _versus_ Renan.) A Lecture
+      addressed to cultured Germans. Zwickau, 1864.
+
+      Friedrich Baumer, _Schwarz, Strauss, Renan_. A Lecture. Leipzig,
+      1864.
+
+      John Cairns, D. D. (of Berwick). _Falsche Christi und der wahre
+      Christus, oder Verteidigung der evangelischen Geschichte gegen
+      Strauss und Renan._ (False Christs and the True, a Defence of the
+      Gospel History against Strauss and Renan.) A Lecture delivered
+      before the Bible Society. Translated from the English. Hamburg,
+      1864.
+
+      Bernhard ter Haar, Doctor of Theology and Professor at Utrecht,
+      _Zehn Vorlesungen ueber Renans Leben-Jesu_. (Ten Lectures on Renan's
+      Life of Jesus.) Translated by H. Doermer. Gotha, 1864.
+
+      Paulus Cassel, Professor and Licentiate in Theology, _Bericht ueber
+      Renans Leben-Jesu_. (A Report upon Renan's Life of Jesus.)
+
+      J. J. van Oosterzee, Doctor and Professor of Theology at Utrecht,
+      _Geschichte oder Roman? Das Leben-Jesu von Renan vorlaeufig
+      beleuchtet._ (History or Fiction? A Preliminary Examination of
+      Renan's Life of Jesus.) Hamburg, 1864.
+
+  124 Strauss's second Life of Jesus appeared in French in 1864.
+
+  125 "I can now say without incurring the reproach of self-glorification,
+      and almost without needing to fear contradiction, that if my Life of
+      Jesus had not appeared in the year after Schleiermacher's death, his
+      would not have been withheld for so long. Up to that time it would
+      have been hailed by the theological world as a deliverer; but for
+      the wounds which my work inflicted on the theology of the day, it
+      had neither anodyne nor dressing; nay, it displayed the author as in
+      a measure responsible for the disaster, for the waters which he had
+      admitted drop by drop were now, in defiance of his prudent
+      reservations, pouring in like a flood."--From the Introduction to
+      _The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History_, 1865.
+
+  126 "Now that Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus at last lies before us in
+      print, all parties can gather about it in heartfelt rejoicing. The
+      appearance of a work by Schleiermacher is always an enrichment to
+      literature. Any product of a mind like his cannot fail to shed light
+      and life on the minds of others. And of works of this kind our
+      theological literature has certainly in these days no superfluity.
+      Where the living are for the most part as it were dead, it is meet
+      that the dead should arise and bear witness. These lectures of
+      Schleiermacher's, when compared with the work of his pupils, show
+      clearly that the great theologian has let fall upon them only his
+      mantle and not his spirit."--_Ibid._
+
+  127 The lines of Schleiermacher's work were followed by Bunsen. His Life
+      of Jesus forms vol. ix. of his _Bibelwerk_. (Edited by Holtzmann,
+      1865.) He accepts the Fourth Gospel as an historical source and
+      treats the question of miracle as not yet settled. Christian Karl
+      Josias von Bunsen, born in 1791 at Korbach in Waldeck, was Prussian
+      ambassador at Rome, Berne, and London, and settled later in
+      Heidelberg. He was well read in theology and philology, and
+      gradually came, in spite of his friendly relations with Friedrich
+      Wilhelm IV., to entertain more liberal views on religion. The issue
+      of his _Bibelwerk fuer die Gemeinde_ was begun in 1858. He died in
+      1860. (Best known in England as the Chevalier Bunsen.)
+
+  128 Ch. H. Weisse, _Die evangelische Geschichte_, Leipzig, 1838. _Die
+      Evangelienfrage in ihrem gegenwaertigen Stadium._ (The Present
+      Position of the Problem of the Gospels.) Leipzig, 1856. He regarded
+      the discourses as historical, the narrative portions as of secondary
+      origin. Alexander Schweizer, again, wished to distinguish a
+      Jerusalem source and a Galilaean source, the latter being
+      unreliable. _Das Evangelium Johannis nach seinem inneren Werte und
+      seiner Bedeutung fuer das Leben Jesu_, 1841. (The Gospel of John
+      considered in Relation to its Intrinsic Value and its Importance as
+      a Source for the Life of Jesus.) See p. 127 f. Renan takes the
+      narrative portions as authentic and the discourses as secondary.
+
+  129 Karl Heinrich Weizsaecker was born in 1822 at Oehringen in Wuertemberg.
+      He qualified as Privat-Docent in 1847 and, after acting in the
+      meantime as Court-Chaplain and Oberkonsistorialrat at Stuttgart,
+      became in 1861 the successor of Baur at Tuebingen. He died in 1899.
+
+  130 The works of a Dutch writer named Stricker, _Jesus von Nazareth_
+      (1868), and of the Englishman Sir Richard Hanson, _The Jesus of
+      History_ (1869), were based on Mark without any reference to John.
+
+  131 1, Mark i.; 2, Mark ii. 1-iii. 6; 3, Mark iii. 7-19; 4, Mark iii.
+      19-iv. 34; 5, Mark iv. 35-vi. 6; 6, Mark vi. 7-vii. 37; 7, Mark
+      viii. 1-ix. 50.
+
+  132 Holtzmann, _Kommentar zu den Synoptikern_, 1889, p. 184. The form of
+      the expression (_Fluchtwege und Reisen_) is derived from Keim.
+
+  133 "Thus the course of Jesus' life hastened forward to its tragic
+      close, a close which was foreseen and predicted by Jesus Himself
+      with ever-growing clearness as the sole possible close, but also
+      that which alone was worthy of Himself, and which was necessary as
+      being foreseen and predetermined in the counsel of God. The hatred
+      of the Pharisees and the indifference of the people left from the
+      first no other prospect open. That hatred could not but be called
+      forth in the fullest measure by the ruthless severity with which
+      Jesus exposed all that it was and implied--a heart in which there was
+      no room for love, a morality inwardly riddled with decay, an outward
+      show of virtue, a hypocritical arrogance. Between two such
+      unyielding opponents--a man who, to all appearance, aimed at using
+      the Messianic expectations of the people for his own ends, and a
+      hierarchy as tenacious of its claims and as sensitive to their
+      infringement as any that has ever existed--it was certain that the
+      breach must soon become irreparable. It was easy to foresee, too,
+      that even in Galilee only a minority of the people would dare to
+      face with Him the danger of such a breach. There was only one thing
+      that could have averted the death sentence which had been early
+      determined upon--a series of vigorous, unambiguous demonstrations on
+      the part of the people. In order to provoke such demonstrations
+      Jesus would have needed, if only for the moment, to take into His
+      service the popular, powerful, inflammatory Messianic ideas, or
+      rather, would have needed to place Himself at their service. His
+      refusal to enter, by so much as a single step, upon this course,
+      which from any ordinary point of view of human policy would have
+      been legitimate, because the only practicable one, was the sole
+      sufficient and all-explaining cause of His destruction."--Holtzmann,
+      _Die synoptischen Evangelien_, 1863, pp. 485, 486.
+
+  134 "Ein innerliches Reich der Sinnesaenderung." "Sinnesaenderung"
+      corresponds more exactly than "repentance" to the Greek {~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}
+      (change of mind, change of attitude), but the _phrase_ is no less
+      elliptical in German than in English. The meaning is doubtless
+      "kingdom based upon repentance, consisting of those who have
+      fulfilled this condition."
+
+  135 Omitted in some of the best texts.--F. C. B.
+
+  136 Oskar Holtzmann, _Das Leben Jesu_, 1901.
+
+  137 _Die modernen Darstellungen des Lebens Jesu._ (Modern Presentments
+      of the Life of Jesus.) A discussion of the works of Strauss, Renan,
+      and Schenkel, and of the Essays of Coquerel the younger, Scherer,
+      Colani, and Keim. A lecture by Chr. Ernest Luthardt, Leipzig. 1st
+      and 2nd editions, 1864. Luthardt was born in 1823 at Maroldsweisach
+      in Lower Franconia, became Docent at Erlangen in 1851, was called to
+      Marburg as Professor Extraordinary in 1854, and to Leipzig as
+      Ordinary Professor in 1856. He died in 1902.
+
+  138 _Zur Orientierung ueber meine Schrift __"__Das Charakterbild
+      Jesu.__"_ (Explanations intended to place my work "A Picture of the
+      Character of Jesus" in the proper light.) 1864. _Die protestantische
+      Freiheit in ihrem gegenwaertigen Kampfe mit der kirchlichen
+      Reaktion._ (Protestant Freedom in its present Struggle with
+      Ecclesiastical Reaction.) 1865.
+
+  139 _Der Schenkel'sche Handel in Baden._ (The Schenkel Controversy in
+      Baden.) (A corrected reprint from number 441 of the _National-
+      Zeitung_ of September 21, 1864.) An appendix to _Der Christus des
+      Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte_. 1865.
+
+  140 Theodor Keim, _Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, in ihrer Verhaltung
+      mit dem Gesamtleben seines Volkes frei untersucht und ausfuehrlich
+      erzaehlt_. (The History of Jesus of Nazara in Relation to the General
+      Life of His People, freely examined and fully narrated.) 3 vols.
+      Zurich, 1867-1872. Vol. i. The Day of Preparation; vol. ii. The Year
+      of Teaching in Galilee; vol. iii. The Death-Passover (_Todesostern_)
+      in Jerusalem. A short account in a more popular form appeared in
+      1872, _Geschichte Jesu nach den Ergebnissen heutiger Wissenschaft
+      fuer weitere Kreise uebersichtlich erzaehlt_. (The History of Jesus
+      according to the Results of Present-day Criticism, briefly narrated
+      for the General Reader.) 2nd ed., 1875.
+
+      Karl Theodor Keim was born in 1825 at Stuttgart, was Repetent at
+      Tuebingen from 1851 to 1855, and after he had been five years in the
+      ministry, became Professor at Zurich in 1860. In 1873 he accepted a
+      call to Giessen, where he died in 1878.
+
+  141 _Die menschliche Entwicklung Jesu Christi._ See Holtzmann, _Die
+      synoptischen Evangelien_, 1863, pp. 7-9. This dissertation was
+      followed by _Der geschichtliche Christus_. 3rd ed., 1866.
+
+  142 _Geschichte Jesu._ 2nd ed., 1875, pp. 228 and 229.
+
+  143 The ultimate reason why Keim deliberately gives such prominence to
+      the eschatology is that he holds to Matthew, and is therefore more
+      under the direct impression of the masses of discourse in this
+      Gospel, charged, as they are, with eschatological ideas, than those
+      writers who find their primary authority in Mark, where these
+      discourses are lacking.
+
+  144 _Geschichte Jesu. Nach akademischen Vorlesungen von Dr. Karl Hase._
+      1876. Special mention ought also to be made of the fine sketch of
+      the Life of Jesus in A. Hausrath's _Neutestamentliche
+      Zeitgeschichte_ (History of New Testament Times), 1st ed., Munich,
+      1868 ff.; 3rd ed., 1 vol., 1879, pp. 325-515; _Die
+      zeitgeschichtlichen Beziehungen des Lebens Jesu_ (The Relations of
+      the Life of Jesus to the History of His time).
+
+      Adolf Hausrath was born at Karlsruhe. He was appointed Professor of
+      Theology at Heidelberg in 1867, and died in 1909.
+
+  145 _Das Leben Jesu_, von Willibald Beyschlag: Pt. i. Preliminary
+      Investigations, 1885, 450 pp.; pt. ii. Narrative, 1886, 495 pp. Joh.
+      Heinr. Christoph Willibald Beyschlag was born in 1823 at Frankfort-
+      on-Main, and went to Halle as Professor in 1860. His splendid
+      eloquence made him one of the chief spokesmen of German
+      Protestantism. As a teacher he exercised a remarkable and salutary
+      influence, although his scientific works are too much under the
+      dominance of an apologetic of the heart. He died in 1900.
+
+  146 Bernhard Weiss, _Das Leben Jesu_. 2 vols. Berlin, 1882. See also
+      _Das Markusevangelium_, 1872; _Das Matthaeusevangelium_, 1876; and
+      the _Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Theologie_, 5th ed., 1888.
+      Bernhard Weiss was born in 1827 at Koenigsberg, where he qualified as
+      Privat-Docent in 1852. In 1863 he went as Ordinary Professor to
+      Kiel, and was called to Berlin in the same capacity in 1877.
+
+      Among the distinctly liberal Lives of Jesus of an earlier date, that
+      of W. Krueger-Velthusen (Elberfeld, 1872, 271 pp.) might be mentioned
+      if it were not so entirely uncritical. Although the author does not
+      hold the Fourth Gospel to be apostolic he has no hesitation in
+      making use of it as an historical source.
+
+      There is more sentiment than science, too, in the work of M. G.
+      Weitbrecht, _Das Leben Jesu nach den vier Evangelien_, 1881.
+
+      A weakness in the treatment of the Johannine question and a want of
+      clearness on some other points disfigures the three-volume Life of
+      Jesus of the Paris professor, E. Stapfer, which is otherwise marked
+      by much acumen and real depth of feeling. Vol. i. _Jesus-Christ
+      avant son ministere_ (Fischbacher, Paris, 1896); vol. ii. _Jesus-
+      Christ pendant son ministere_ (1897); vol. iii. _La Mort et la
+      resurrection de Jesus-Christ_ (1898).
+
+      F. Godet writes of "The Life of Jesus before His Public Appearance"
+      (German translation by M. Reineck, _Leben Jesu vor seinem
+      oeffentlichen Auftreten_. Hanover, 1897).
+
+      G. Laengin founds his _Der Christus der Geschichte und sein
+      Christentum_ (The Christ of History and His Christianity) on a
+      purely Synoptic basis. 2 vols., 1897-1898.
+
+      The English _Life of Jesus Christ_, by James Stalker, D. D. (now
+      Professor of Church History in the United Free Church College,
+      Aberdeen), passed through numberless editions (German, 1898;
+      Tuebingen, 4th ed., 1901).
+
+      Very pithy and interesting is Dr. Percy Gardner's _Exploratio
+      Evangelica_. _A Brief Examination of the Basis and Origin of
+      Christian Belief._ 1899; 2nd ed., 1907.
+
+      A work which is free from all compromise is H. Ziegler's _Der
+      geschichtliche Christus_ (The Historical Christ). 1891. For this
+      reason the five lectures, delivered in Liegnitz, out of which it is
+      composed, attracted such unfavourable attention that the
+      Ecclesiastical Council took proceedings against the author. (See the
+      _Christliche Welt_, 1891, pp. 563-568, 874-877.)
+
+  147 Holtzmann, _Neutestamentliche Einleitung_, 2nd ed., 1886. Weizsaecker
+      declares himself in the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_ for 1882,
+      No. 23, and _Das apostolische Zeitalter_, 2nd ed., 1890.
+
+      Hase and Schenkel accepted this position in principle, but were
+      careful to keep open a line of retreat.
+
+      Towards the end of the 'seventies the rejection of the Fourth Gospel
+      as an historical source was almost universally recognised in the
+      critical camp. It is taken for granted in the Life of Jesus by Karl
+      Wittichen (Jena, 1876, 397 pp.), which might be reckoned one of the
+      most clearly conceived works of this kind based on the Marcan
+      hypothesis if its arrangement were not so bad. It is partly in the
+      form of a commentary, inasmuch as the presentment of the life takes
+      the form of a discussion of sixty-seven sections. The detail is very
+      interesting. It makes an impression of _naivete_ when we find a
+      series of sections grouped under the title, "The establishment of
+      _Christianity_ in Galilee." No stress is laid on the significance of
+      Jesus' journey to the north. Wittichen, also, misled by Luke,
+      asserts, just as Weisse had done, that Jesus had worked in Judaea
+      for some time prior to the triumphal entry.
+
+  148 H. H. Wendt, _Die Lehre Jesu_, vol. i. _Die evangelischen
+      Quellenberichte ueber die Lehre Jesu._ (The Record of the Teaching of
+      Jesus in the Gospel Sources.) 354 pp. Goettingen, 1886; vol. ii.,
+      1890; Eng. trans., 1892. Second German edition in one vol., 626 pp.,
+      1901. See also the same writer's _Das Johannesevangelium_.
+      _Untersuchung seiner Entstehung und seines geschichtlichen Wertes_,
+      1900. (The Gospel of John: an Investigation of its Origin and
+      Historical Value.) Hans Heinrich Wendt was born in 1853 at Hamburg,
+      qualified as Privat-Docent in 1877 at Goettingen, was subsequently
+      Extraordinary Professor at Kiel and Heidelberg, and now works at
+      Jena.
+
+  149 _Johannis Lightfooti, Doctoris Angli et Collegii S. Catharinae in
+      Cantabrigiensi Academia Praefecti, Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae in
+      Quatuor Evangelistas ... nunc secundum in Germania junctim cum
+      Indicibus locorum Scripturae rerumque ac verborum necessariis editae
+      e Museo Io. Benedicti Carpzovii. Lipsiae. Anno MDCLXXXIV._
+
+  150 The pioneer works in the study of apocalyptic were Dillmann's
+      _Henoch_, 1851; and Hilgenfeld's _Juedische Apokalyptik_, 1857.
+
+  151 _Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit, mit den beiden
+      ersten Erzaehlern_, von Gustav Volkmar, Zurich, 1882. To which must
+      be added: _Markus und die Synopse der Evangelien, nach dem
+      urkundlichen Text; und das Geschichtliche vom Leben Jesu_. (Mark and
+      Synoptic Material in the Gospels, according to the original text;
+      and the historical elements in the Life of Jesus.) Zurich, 1869; 2nd
+      edition, 1876, 738 pp. Volkmar was born in 1809, and was living at
+      Fulda as a Gymnasium (High School) teacher, when in 1852 he was
+      arrested by the Hessian Government on account of his political
+      views, and subsequently deprived of his post. In 1853 he went to
+      Zurich, where a new prospect opened to him as a Docent in theology.
+      He died in 1893.
+
+  152 Kienlen, "Die eschatologische Rede Jesu Matt. xxiv. cum Parall."
+      (The Eschatological Discourse of Jesus in Matt. xxiv. with the
+      parallel passages), _Jahrbuch fuer die Theologie_, 1869, pp. 706-709.
+      Analysis of other attempts directed to the same end in Weiffenbach,
+      _Der Wiederkunftsgedanke_, p. 31 ff.
+
+  153 Wilhelm Weiffenbach, Director of the Seminary for Theological
+      Students at Friedberg, was born in 1842 at Bornheim in Rhenish
+      Hesse.
+
+  154 The English reader will find a constructive analysis of what is
+      known as the "Little Apocalypse" in _Encyclopaedia Biblica_, art.
+      "Gospels," col. 1857. It consists of the verses Matt. xxiv. 6-8,
+      15-22, 29-31, 34, corresponding to Mark xiii. 7-9_a_, 14-20, 24-27,
+      30. According to the theory first sketched by Colani these verses
+      formed an independent Apocalypse which was embedded in the Gospel by
+      the Evangelist.--F. C. B.
+
+  155 _Untersuchungen ueber die evangelische Geschichte_, 1864, pp.
+      121-126.
+
+  156 "Ueber die Komposition der eschatologischen Rede Matt. xxiv. 4 ff."
+      (The Composition of the Eschatological Discourse in Matt. xxiv. 4
+      ff.), _Jahrbuch f. d. Theol._ vol. xiii., 1868, pp. 134-149.
+
+  157 By "Capernaitic" Weiffenbach apparently means literalistic; cf. John
+      vi. 52 f.
+
+  158 Wilhelm Baldensperger, at present Professor at Giessen, was born in
+      1856 at Muelhausen in Alsace.
+
+  159 A new edition appeared in 1891. There is no fundamental alteration,
+      but in consequence of the polemic against opponents who had arisen
+      in the meantime it is fuller. The first part of a third edition
+      appeared in 1903 under the title _Die messianisch-apokalyptischen
+      Hoffnungen des Judentums_.
+
+      See also the interesting use made of Late-Jewish and Rabbinic ideas
+      in Alfred Edersheim's _The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_, 2nd
+      ed., London, 1884, 2 vols.
+
+  160 Emil Schuerer, _Geschichte des juedischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu
+      Christi_. (History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ.) 2nd
+      ed., part second, 1886, pp. 417 ff. Here is to be found also a
+      bibliography of the older literature of the subject. 3rd ed., 1889,
+      vol. ii. pp. 498 ff.
+
+      Emil Schuerer was born at Augsburg in 1844, and from 1873 onwards was
+      successively Professor at Leipzig, Giessen, and Kiel, and is now
+      (1909) at Goettingen.
+
+      The latest presentment of Jewish apocalyptic is _Die juedische
+      Eschatologie von Daniel bis Akiba_, by Paul Volz, Pastor in
+      Leonberg. Tuebingen, 1903. 412 pp. The material is very completely
+      given. Unfortunately the author has chosen the systematic method of
+      treating his subject, instead of tracing the history of its
+      development, the only right way. As a consequence Jesus and Paul
+      occupy far too little space in this survey of Jewish apocalyptic.
+      For a treatment of the origin of Jewish eschatology from the point
+      of view of the history of religion see Hugo Gressmann, now Professor
+      at Berlin, _Der Ursprung der israelitisch-juedischen Eschatologie_
+      (The Origin of the Israelitish and Jewish Eschatology), Goettingen,
+      1905. 377 pp.
+
+  161 Johannes Weiss, now Professor at Marburg, was born at Kiel in 1863.
+
+  162 It may be mentioned that this work had been preceded (in 1891) by
+      two Leiden prize dissertations, _Ueber die Lehre vom Reich Gottes im
+      Neuen Testament_ (Concerning the Kingdom of God in the New
+      Testament), one of them by Issel, the other, which lays especially
+      strong emphasis upon the eschatology, by Schmoller.
+
+  163 Wilhelm Bousset, now Professor in Goettingen, born 1865 at Luebeck
+
+  164 _Theol. Rundschau_ (1901), 4, pp. 89-103.
+
+  165 W. Bousset, _Die juedische Apokalyptik in ihrer
+      religionsgeschichtlichen Herkunft und ihrer Bedeutung fuer das Neue
+      Testament_. (The Origin of Apocalyptic as indicated by Comparative
+      Religion, and its significance for the understanding of the New
+      Testament.) Berlin, 1903. 67 pp. See also W. Bousset, _Die Religion
+      des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter_, 512 pp., 1902. For
+      the assertion of Parsic influences see also Stave, _Der Einfluss des
+      Parsismus auf das Judentum_. Haarlem, 1898.
+
+  166 _Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu im Verhaeltnis zu den
+      messianischen Hoffnungen seines Volkes und zu seinem eigenen
+      Messiasbewusstsein._ Freiburg, 1895, 119 pp. See also his inaugural
+      dissertation of 1896, _Le Principe de la morale de Jesus_. Paris,
+      1896.
+
+      A. K. Rogers, _The Life and Teachings of Jesus; a Critical Analysis,
+      etc._ (London and New York, 1894), regards Jesus' teaching as purely
+      ethical, refusing to admit any eschatology at all.
+
+  167 Paris, 2 vols., 500 and 512 pp.
+
+  168 W. Weiffenbach, _Die Frage der Wiederkunst Jesu_. (The Question
+      concerning the Second Coming of Jesus.) Friedberg, 1901.
+
+  169 A. Titius, _Die neutestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit und ihre
+      Bedeutung fuer die Gegenwart_. I. Teil: _Jesu Lehre vom Reich
+      Gottes_. (The New Testament Doctrine of Blessedness and its
+      Significance for the Present. Pt. I., Jesus' Doctrine of the Kingdom
+      of God.) Arthur Titius, now Professor at Kiel, was born in 1864 at
+      Sensburg.
+
+  170 _Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien_,
+      167 pp. Erich Haupt, now Professor in Halle, was born in 1841 at
+      Stralsund.
+
+  171 Cf. the preface to the 2nd ed. of Joh. Weiss's _Die Predigt Jesu vom
+      Reiche Gottes_. Goettingen, 1900.
+
+  172 Tuebingen-Leipzig, 1901, 410 pp.; 2nd ed., 1904. Paul Wernle, now
+      Professor of Church History at Basle, was born in Zurich, 1872.
+
+  173 _Israelitische und juedische Geschichte_, 1st ed., 1894, pp. 163-168;
+      2nd ed., 1895, pp. 198-204; 3rd ed., 1897; 4th ed., 1901, pp.
+      380-394. See also his _Skizzen_ (Sketches), pp. 6, 187 ff.
+
+      See also J. Wellhausen, _Das Evangelium Marci_, 1903, 2nd ed., 1909;
+      _Das Evangelium Matthaei_, 1904; _Das Evangelium Lucae_, 1904.
+
+      Julius Wellhausen, now Professor at Goettingen, was born in 1844 at
+      Hameln.
+
+  174 Emil Schuerer, _Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu Christi_.
+      (The Messianic Self-consciousness of Jesus Christ.) 1903, 24 pp.
+
+      According to J. Meinhold, too, in _Jesus und das alte Testament_
+      (Jesus and the Old Testament), 1896, Jesus did not purpose to be the
+      Messiah of Israel.
+
+  175 _Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des Christentums auf
+      Grund einer Kritik der Berichte ueber das Leiden und die Auferstehung
+      Jesu._ (The Gospel History and the Origin of Christianity considered
+      in the light of a critical investigation of the Reports of the
+      Suffering and Resurrection of Jesus.) By Dr. W. Brandt, Leipzig,
+      1893, 588 pp.
+
+      Wilhelm Brandt was born in 1855 of German parents in Amsterdam and
+      became a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1891 he resigned
+      this office and studied in Strassburg and Berlin. In 1893 he was
+      appointed to lecture in General History of Religion as a member of
+      the theological faculty of Amsterdam.
+
+  176 Ad. Juelicher, _Die Gleichnisreden Jesu_. Vol. i., 1888. The
+      substance of it had already been published in a different form.
+      Freiburg, 1886.
+
+      Adolf Juelicher, at present Professor in Marburg, was born in 1857 at
+      Falkenberg.
+
+  177 W. Bousset, _Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum_.
+      Goettingen, 1892.
+
+  178 Ad. Juelicher, _Die Gleichnisreden Jesu_, 2nd pt. (Exposition of the
+      Parables in the first three Gospels.) Freiburg, 1899, 641 pp.
+
+      Chr. A. Bugge, _Die Hauptparabeln Jesu_ (The most important Parables
+      of Jesus), German, from the Norwegian, Giessen, 1903, rightly
+      remarks on the obscure and inexplicable character of some of the
+      parables, but makes no attempt to deal with it from the historical
+      point of view.
+
+  179 Arnold Meyer, _Jesu Muttersprache_, 1896. P. W. Schmidt, too, in his
+      _Geschichte Jesu_ (Freiburg, 1899), defends the same interpretation,
+      and seeks to explain this obscure saying by the other about the
+      "strait gate."
+
+  180 _Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes_, 2nd ed., 1900, p. 192 ff.
+
+  181 _Stud. Krit._, 1836, pp. 90-122.
+
+  182 See also _Die Vorstellungen vom Messias und vom Gottesreich bei den
+      Synoptikern_. (The Conceptions of the Messiah and the Kingdom of God
+      in the Synoptic Gospels.) By Ludwig Paul. Bonn, 1895. 130 pp. This
+      comprehensive study discusses all the problems which are referred to
+      below. Matt. xi. 12-14 is discussed under the heading "The Hinderers
+      of the Kingdom of God."
+
+  183 A. Hilgenfeld, _Zeitschr. f. wiss. Theol._, 1888, pp. 488-498; 1892,
+      pp. 445-464.
+
+  184 Orello Cone, "Jesus' Self-designation in the Synoptic Gospels," _The
+      New World_, 1893, pp. 492-518.
+
+  185 H. L. Oort, _Die uitdrukking {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~} in het Nieuwe
+      Testament_. (The Expression Son of Man in the New Testament.)
+      Leyden, 1893.
+
+  186 R. H. Charles, "The Son of Man," _Expos. Times_, 1893.
+
+  187 _Die juedische Apokalyptik in ihrer religionsgeschichtlichen Herkunft
+      und ihrer Bedeutung fuer das Neue Testament._ (Jewish Apocalyptic in
+      its religious-historical origin and in its significance for the New
+      Testament.) 1903.
+
+      On the eschatology of Jesus see also Schwartzkoppf, _Die
+      Weissagungen Jesu Christi von seinen Tode, seiner Auferstehung und
+      Wiederkunft und ihre Erfuellung_. (The Predictions of Jesus Christ
+      concerning His Death, His Resurrection, and Second Coming, and their
+      Fulfilment.) 1895.
+
+      P. Wernle, _Die Reichgotteshofnung in den aeltesten christlichen
+      Dokumenten und bei Jesus_. (The Hope of the Kingdom of God in the
+      most ancient Christian Documents and as held by Jesus.)
+
+  188 Arnold Meyer, now Professor of New Testament Theology and Pastoral
+      Theology at Zurich, and formerly at Bonn, was born at Wesel in 1861.
+
+  189 Giambern. de Rossi, _Dissertazione della lingua propria di Christo e
+      degli Ebrei nazionali della Palestina da' Tempi de' Maccabei in
+      disamina del sentimento di un recente scrittore Italiano_. Parma,
+      1772.
+
+  190 _Der Bericht des Matthaeus von Jesu dem Messias._ (Matthew's account
+      of Jesus the Messiah.) Altona, 1792. According to Meyer, p. 105 ff.,
+      this was a very striking performance.
+
+  191 The name Chaldee was due to the mistaken belief that the language in
+      which parts of Daniel and Ezra were written was really the
+      vernacular of Babylonia. That vernacular, now known to us from
+      cuneiform tablets and inscriptions, is a Semitic language, but quite
+      different from Aramaic.--F. C. B.
+
+  192 Emil Friedrich Kautzsch was born in 1841 at Plauen in Saxony, and
+      studied in Leipzig, where he became Privat-Docent in 1869. In 1872
+      he was called as Professor to Basle, in 1880 to Tuebingen, in 1888 to
+      Halle.
+
+  193 Gustaf Dalman, Professor at Leipzig, was born in 1865 at Niesky. In
+      addition to the works of his named above, see also _Der leidende und
+      der sterbende Messias_ (The Suffering and Dying Messiah), 1888; and
+      _Was sagt der Talmud ueber Jesum?_ (What does the Talmud say about
+      Jesus?), 1891.
+
+  194 2 Kings xviii. 26 ff.
+
+  195 _Studia Biblica_ I. _Essays in Biblical Archaeology and Criticism and
+      Kindred Subjects by Members of the University of Oxford_. Clarendon
+      Press, 1885, pp. 39-74. See Meyer, p. 29 ff.
+
+  196 Franz Delitzsch, _Die Buecher des Neuen Testaments aus dem
+      Griechischen ins Hebraeische uebersetzt_. 1877. (The Books of the N.T.
+      translated from Greek into Hebrew.) This work has been circulated by
+      thousands among Jews throughout the whole world.
+
+      Delitzsch was born in 1813 at Leipzig and became Privat-Docent there
+      in 1842, went to Rostock as Professor in 1846, to Erlangen in 1850,
+      and returned in 1867 to Leipzig. By conviction he was a strict
+      Lutheran in theology. He was one of the leading experts in Late-
+      Jewish and Talmudic literature. He died in 1890.
+
+  197 See Meyer, p. 47 ff.
+
+  198 See Meyer, p. 61 ff.
+
+  199 Hans Lietzmann, now Professor in Jena, was born in 1875 at
+      Duesseldorf. Until his call to Jena he worked as a Privat-Docent at
+      Bonn. He has done some very meritorious work in the publication of
+      Early Christian writings.
+
+  200 See Meyer, p. 141 ff.
+
+  201 "De Oorsprong van de uitdrukking 'Zoon des Menschen' als
+      evangelische Messiastitel," _Theol. Tijdschr._, 1894. (The Origin of
+      the Expression "Son of Man" as a Title of the Messiah in the
+      Gospels.)
+
+  202 H. Lietzmann, "Zur Menschensohnfrage" (The Son-of-Man Problem),
+      _Theol. Arb. des Rhein. wissenschaftl. Predigervereins_, 1898.
+
+  203 N. Schmidt, "Was {~HEBREW LETTER BET~}{~HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN~} {~HEBREW LETTER NUN~}{~HEBREW LETTER SHIN~}{~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~} a Messianic title?" _Journal of the Society
+      for Biblical Literature_, xv., 1896.
+
+  204 P. Schmiedel, "Der Name Menschensohn und das Messiasbewusstsein
+      Jesu" (The Designation Son of Man and the Messianic Consciousness of
+      Jesus), 1898, _Prot. Monatsh._ 2, pp. 252-267.
+
+  205 H. Gunkel, _Z. w. Th._, 1899, 42, pp. 581-611.
+
+  206 For the last phase of the discussion we may name:
+
+      Wellhausen, _Skizzen und Vorarbeiten_ (Sketches and Studies), 1899,
+      pp. 187-215, where he throws further light on Dalman's philological
+      objections; and goes on to deny Jesus' use of the expression.
+
+      W. Baldensperger, "Die neueste Forschung ueber den Menschensohn,"
+      _Theol. Rundschau_, 1900, 3, pp. 201-210, 243-255.
+
+      P. Fiebig, _Der Menschensohn_. Tuebingen, 1901.
+
+      P. W. Schmiedel, "Die neueste Auffassung des Namens Menschensohn,"
+      _Prot. Monatsh._ 5, pp. 333-351, 1901. (The Latest View of the
+      Designation Son of Man.)
+
+      P. W. Schmidt, _Die Geschichte Jesu_, ii.
+      (_Erlaeuterungen_--Explanations). Tuebingen, 1904, p. 157 ff.
+
+  207 Dalman's reputation as an authority upon Jewish Aramaic is so
+      deservedly high, that it is necessary to point out that his solution
+      did not, as Dr. Schweitzer seems to say, entirely dispose of the
+      linguistic difficulties raised by Lietzmann as to the meaning and
+      use of _barnash_ and _barnasha_ in Aramaic. The English reader will
+      find the linguistic facts well put in sections 4 and 32 of N.
+      Schmidt's article "Son of Man" in _Encyclopaedia Biblica_ (cols.
+      4708, 4723), or he may consult Prof. Bevan's review of Dalman's
+      _Worte Jesu_ in the _Critical Review_ for 1899, p. 148 ff. The main
+      point is that {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} and {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~} are equally
+      legitimate translations of _barnasha_. Thus the contrast in the
+      Greek between {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} and {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~} in Mark ii. 27 and
+      28, or again in Mark viii. 36 and 38, disappears on retranslation
+      into the dialect spoken by Jesus. Whether this linguistic fact makes
+      the sayings in which {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~} occurs unhistorical is a
+      further question, upon which scholars can take, and have taken,
+      opposite opinions.--F. C. B.
+
+  208 See _Worte Jesu_, 1898, p. 191 ff. (= E. T. p. 234 ff.).
+
+  209 See the classical discussion in J. Weiss, _Die Predigt Jesus vom
+      Reiche Gottes_, 1892, 1st ed., p. 52 ff.
+
+      In the second edition, of 1900, p. 160 ff., he allows himself to be
+      led astray by the "chiefest apostles" of modern theology to indulge
+      in the subtleties of fine-spun psychology, and explain Jesus' way of
+      speaking of Himself in the third person as the Son of Man as due to
+      the "extreme modesty of Jesus," a modesty which did not forsake Him
+      in the presence of His judges. This recent access of psychologising
+      exegesis has not conduced to clearness of presentation, and the
+      preference for the Lucan narrative does not so much contribute to
+      throw light on the facts as to discover in the thoughts of Jesus
+      subtleties of which the historical Jesus never dreamt. If the Lord
+      always used the term Son of Man when speaking of His Messiahship,
+      the reason was that this was the only way in which He could speak of
+      it at all, since the Messiahship was not yet realised, but was only
+      to be so at the appearing of the Son of Man. For a consistent,
+      purely historical, non-psychological exposition of the Son-of-Man
+      passages see Albert Schweitzer, _Das Messianitaets- und
+      Leidensgeheimnis_. (The Secret of the Messiahship and the Passion.)
+      A sketch of the Life of Jesus. Tuebingen, 1901.
+
+  210 See Dalman, p. 60 ff.
+
+      John Lightfoot, _Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae in quatuor
+      Evangelistas_. Edited by J. B. Carpzov. Leipzig, 1684.
+
+      Christian Schoettgen, _Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae in universum
+      Novum Testamentum_. Dresden-Leipzig, 1733.
+
+      Joh. Gerh. Meuschen, _Novum Testamentum ex Talmude et antiquitatibus
+      Hebraeorum illustratum_. Leipzig, 1736.
+
+      J. Jakob. Wettstein, _Novum Testamentum Graecum_. Amsterdam, 1751
+      and 1752.
+
+      F. Nork, _Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen zu neutestamentlichen
+      Schriftstellen_, Leipzig, 1839.
+
+      Franz Delitzsch, "Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae," in the _Luth.
+      Zeitsch._, 1876-1878.
+
+      Carl Siegfried, _Analecta Rabbinica_, 1875; "Rabbin. Analekten,"
+      _Jahrb. f. prot. Theol._, 1876.
+
+      A. Wuensche, _Neue Beitraege zur Erlaeuterung der Evangelien aus Talmud
+      und Midrasch_. (Contributions to the Exposition of the Gospels from
+      Talmud and Midrash.) Goettingen, 1878.
+
+  211 Leipzig, 1880; 2nd ed., 1897.
+
+  212 Cf. for what follows, Juelicher, _Die Gleichnisreden Jesu_, i., 1888,
+      p. 164 ff.
+
+  213 Robert Sheringham of Caius College, Cambridge, a royalist divine,
+      published an edition of the Talmudic tractate _Yoma_. London,
+      1648.--F. C. B.
+
+  214 T. Tal, _Professor Oort und der Talmud_, 1880. See upon this Van
+      Manen, _Jahrb. f. prot. Theol._, 1884, p. 569. The best collection
+      of Talmudic parables is, according to Juelicher, that of Prof. Guis.
+      Levi, translated by L. Seligman as _Parabeln, Legenden und Gedanken
+      aus Talmud und Midrasch_. Leipzig, 2nd ed., 1877.
+
+  215 The question may be said to have been provisionally settled by Paul
+      Fiebig's work, _Altjuedische Gleichnisse und die Gleichnisse Jesu_
+      (Ancient Jewish Parables and the Parables of Jesus), Tuebingen, 1904,
+      in which he gives some fifty Late-Jewish parables, and compares them
+      with those of Jesus, the final result being to show more clearly
+      than ever the uniqueness and absoluteness of His creations.
+
+  216 See the explanation by means of the Aramaic of a selection of the
+      sayings of Jesus in Meyer, pp. 72-90. A Judaism more under Parsee
+      influence is assumed as explaining the origin of Christianity by E.
+      Boeklen, _Die Verwandschaft der juedisch-christlichen mit der
+      parsischen Eschatologie_ (The Relation of Jewish-Christian to
+      Persian Eschatology), 1902, 510 ff.
+
+  217 The same view is expressed by Wellhausen, _Israelitische und
+      juedische Geschichte_, 3rd ed., p. 381, note 2; and by Albert
+      Schweitzer, _Das Messianitaets- und Leidensgeheimnis_, 1901.
+
+  218 See the Apocalypse of Baruch, and Fourth Ezra.
+
+  219 _La Vie inconnue de Jesus-Christ_, par Nicolas Notowitsch. Paris,
+      1894.
+
+  220 See Juelicher, _Gleichnisreden Jesu_, i., 1888, p. 172 ff.
+
+  221 Max Mueller, _India, What can it teach us?_ London, 1883, p. 279.
+
+  222 Rudolf Seydel, Professor in the University of Leipzig, _Das
+      Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhaeltnissen zu Buddha-Sage und
+      Buddha-Lehre mit fortlaufender Ruecksicht auf andere
+      Religionskreise_. (The Gospel of Jesus in its relation to the Buddha
+      Legend and the Teaching of Buddha, with constant reference to other
+      religious groups.) Leipzig, 1882, p. 337.
+
+      Other works by the same author are _Buddha und Christus_. Deutsche
+      Buecherei No. 33, Breslau, Schottlaender, 1884.
+
+      _Die Buddha-Legende und das Leben Jesu nach den Evangelien._ 2nd ed.
+      Weimar, 1897. (Edited by the son of the late author.) 129 pp.
+
+      See also on this question Van den Bergh van Eysinga, _Indische
+      Einfluesse auf evangelische Erzaehlungen_. Goettingen, 1904. 104 pp.
+
+      According to J. M. Robertson, _Christianity and Mythology_ (London,
+      1900), the Christ-Myth is merely a form of the Krishna-Myth. The
+      whole Gospel tradition is to be symbolically interpreted.
+
+  223 _Das Christentum des Neuen Testaments_, 1905.
+
+  224 Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, _Handkommentar_. _Die Synoptiker._ 1st
+      ed., 1889; 3rd ed., 1901. _Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen
+      Theologie_, 1896, vol. i.
+
+  225 In the Catholic Church the study of the Life of Jesus has remained
+      down to the present day entirely free from scepticism. The reason of
+      that is, that in principle it has remained at a pre-Straussian
+      standpoint, and does not venture upon an unreserved application of
+      historical considerations either to the miracle question or to the
+      Johannine question, and naturally therefore resigns the attempt to
+      take account of and explain the great historical problems.
+
+      We may name the following Lives of Jesus produced by German Catholic
+      writers:--
+
+      Joh. Nep. Sepp, _Das Leben Jesu Christi_. Regensburg, 1843-1846. 7
+      vols., 2nd ed., 1853-1862.
+
+      Peter Schegg, _Sechs Buecher des Lebens Jesu_. (The Life of Jesus in
+      Six Books.) Freiburg, 1874-1875. c. 1200 pp.
+
+      Joseph Grimm, _Das Leben Jesu_. Wuerzburg, 2nd ed., 1890-1903. 6
+      vols.
+
+      Richard von Kralik, _Jesu Leben und Werk_. Kempten-Nuernberg, 1904.
+      481 pp.
+
+      W. Capitaine, _Jesus von Nazareth_. Regensburg, 1905. 192 pp.
+
+      How narrow are the limits within which the Catholic study of the
+      life of Jesus moves even when it aims at scientific treatment, is
+      illustrated by Hermann Schell's _Christus_ (Mainz, 1903. 152 pp.).
+      After reading the forty-two questions with which he introduces his
+      narrative one might suppose that the author was well aware of the
+      bearing of all the historical problems of the life of Jesus, and
+      intended to supply an answer to them. Instead of doing so, however,
+      he adopts as the work proceeds more and more the role of an
+      apologist, not facing definitely either the miracle question or the
+      Johannine question, but gliding over the difficulties by the aid of
+      ingenious headings, so that in the end his book almost takes the
+      form of an explanatory text to the eighty-nine illustrations which
+      adorn the book and make it difficult to read.
+
+      In France, Renan's work gave the incentive to an extensive Catholic
+      "Life-of-Jesus" literature. We may name the following:--
+
+      Louis Veuillot, _La Vie de notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ_. Paris,
+      1864. 509 pp. German by Waldeyer. Koeln-Neuss, 1864. 573 pp.
+
+      H. Wallon, _Vie de notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ_. Paris, 1865. 355
+      pp.
+
+      A work which met with a particularly favourable reception was that
+      of Pere Didon, the Dominican, _Jesus-Christ_, Paris, 1891, 2 vols.,
+      vol. i. 483 pp., vol. ii. 469 pp. The German translation is dated
+      1895.
+
+      In the same year there appeared a new edition of the "Bitter
+      Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ" (see above, p. 109 f.) by
+      Katharina Emmerich; the cheap popular edition of the translation of
+      Renan's "Life of Jesus"; and the eighth edition of Strauss's "Life
+      of Jesus for the German People."
+
+      We may quote from the ecclesiastical _Approbation_ printed at the
+      beginning of Didon's Life of Jesus. "If the author sometimes seems
+      to speak the language of his opponents, it is at once evident that
+      he has aimed at defeating them on their own ground, and he is
+      particularly successful in doing so when he confronts their
+      irreligious a priori theories with the positive arguments of
+      history."
+
+      As a matter of fact the work is skilfully written, but without a
+      spark of understanding of the historical questions.
+
+      All honour to Alfred Loisy! (_Le Quatrieme Evangile_, Paris, 1903,
+      960 pp.), who takes a clear view on the Johannine question, and
+      denies the existence of a Johannine historical tradition. But what
+      that means for the Catholic camp may be recognised from the
+      excitement produced by the book and its express condemnation. See
+      also the same writer's _L'Evangile et l'Eglise_ (German translation,
+      Munich, 1904, 189 pp.), in which Loisy here and there makes good
+      historical points against Harnack's "What is Christianity?"
+
+  226 Oskar Holtzmann, Professor of Theology at Giessen, was born in 1859
+      at Stuttgart.
+
+  227 This suggestion reminds us involuntarily of the old rationalistic
+      Lives of Jesus, which are distressed that Jesus should have injured
+      the good people of the country of the Gesarenes by sacrificing their
+      swine in healing the demoniac. A good deal of old rationalistic
+      material crops up in the very latest Lives of Jesus, as cannot
+      indeed fail to be the case in view of the arbitrary interpretation
+      of detail which is common to both. According to Oskar Holtzmann the
+      barren fig-tree has also a symbolical meaning. "It is a pledge given
+      by God to Jesus that His faith shall not be put to shame in the
+      great work of His life."
+
+  228 Isaiah lxii. 11, "Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy
+      salvation cometh."
+
+  229 "For Jesus Himself," Oskar Holtzmann argues, "this discovery"--he
+      means the antinomy which He had discovered in Psalm cx.--"disposed of
+      a doubt which had always haunted him. If He had really known Himself
+      to be descended from the Davidic line, He would certainly not have
+      publicly suggested a doubt as to the Davidic descent of the
+      Messiah."
+
+  230 Oskar Holtzmann's work, _War Jesus Ekstatiker?_ (Tuebingen, 1903, 139
+      pp.) is in reality a new reading of the life of Jesus. By
+      emphasising the ecstatic element he breaks with the "natural"
+      conception of the life and teaching of Jesus; and, in so far,
+      approaches the eschatological view. But he gives a very wide
+      significance to the term ecstatic, subsuming under it, it might
+      almost be said, all the eschatological thoughts and utterances of
+      Jesus. He explains, for instance, that "the conviction of the
+      approaching destruction of existing conditions is ecstatic." At the
+      same time, the only purpose served by the hypothesis of ecstasy is
+      to enable the author to attribute to Jesus "The belief that in His
+      own work the Kingdom of God was already beginning, and the promise
+      of the Kingdom to individuals; this can only be considered
+      ecstatic." The opposites which Bousset brings together by the
+      conception of paradox are united by Holtzmann by means of the
+      hypothesis of ecstasy. That is, however, to play fast and loose with
+      the meaning of "ecstasy." An ecstasy is, in the usual understanding
+      of the word, an abnormal, transient condition of excitement in which
+      the subject's natural capacity for thought and feeling, and
+      therewith all impressions from without, are suspended, being
+      superseded by an intense mental excitation and activity. Jesus may
+      possibly have been in an ecstatic state at His baptism and at the
+      transfiguration. What O. Holtzmann represents as a kind of permanent
+      ecstatic state is rather an eschatological fixed idea. With
+      eschatology, ecstasy has no essential connexion. It is possible to
+      be eschatologically minded without being an ecstatic, and vice
+      versa. Philo attributes a great importance to ecstasy in his
+      religious life, but he was scarcely, if at all, interested in
+      eschatology.
+
+  231 P. W. Schmidt, now Professor in Basle, was born in Berlin in 1845.
+
+  232 Otto Schmiedel, Professor at the Gymnasium at Eisenach, _Die
+      Hauptprobleme der Leben-Jesu-Forschung_. Tuebingen, 1902. 71 pp.
+      Schmiedel was born in 1858.
+
+      Hermann Freiherr von Soden, _Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu_.
+      Von Soden, Professor in Berlin, and preacher at the Jerusalem
+      Kirche, was born in 1852.
+
+      We may mention also the following works:--
+
+      Fritz Barth (born 1856, Professor at Bern), _Die Hauptprobleme des
+      Lebens Jesu_. 1st ed., 1899; 2nd ed., 1903.
+
+      Friedrich Nippold's _Der Entwicklungsgang des Lebens Jesu im
+      Wortlaut der drei ersten Evangelien_ (The Course of the Life of
+      Jesus in the Words of the First Three Evangelists) (Hamburg, 1895,
+      213 pp.) is only an arrangement of the sections.
+
+      Konrad Furrer's _Vortraege ueber das Leben Jesu Christi_ (Lectures on
+      the Life of Jesus Christ) have a special charm by reason of the
+      author's knowledge of the country and the locality. Furrer, who was
+      born in 1838, is Professor at Zurich.
+
+      Another work which should not be forgotten is R. Otto's _Leben und
+      Wirken Jesu nach historisch-kritischer Auffassung_ (Life and Work of
+      Jesus from the Point of View of Historical Criticism). A Lecture.
+      Goettingen, 1902. Rudolf Otto, born in 1869, is Privat-Docent at
+      Goettingen.
+
+  233 Schmiedel is not altogether right in making "the Heidelberg
+      Professor Paulus" follow the same lines as Reimarus, "except that
+      his works, of 1804 and 1828, are less malignant, but only the more
+      dull for that." In reality the deistic Life of Jesus by Reimarus,
+      and the rationalistic Life by Paulus have nothing in common. Paulus
+      was perhaps influenced by Venturini, but not by Reimarus. The
+      assertion that Strauss wrote his "Life of Jesus for the German
+      people" because "Renan's fame gave him no peace" is not justified,
+      either by Strauss's character or by the circumstances in which the
+      second Life of Jesus was produced.
+
+  234 Von Soden gives on pp. 24 ff. the passages of Mark which he supposes
+      to be derived from the Petrine tradition in a different order from
+      that in which they occur in Mark, regrouping them freely. He puts
+      together, for instance, Mark i. 16-20, iii. 13-19, vi. 7-16, viii.
+      27-ix. 1, ix. 33-40, under the title "The formation and training of
+      the band of disciples." He supposes Mark, the pupil of Peter, to
+      have grouped in this way by a kind of association of ideas "what he
+      had heard Peter relate in his missionary journeys, when writing it
+      down after Peter's death, not connectedly, but giving as much as he
+      could remember of it"; this would be in accordance with the
+      statement of Papias that Mark wrote "not in order." Papias's
+      statement, therefore, refers to an "Ur-Markus," which he found
+      lacking in historical order.
+
+      But what are we to make of a representative of the early Church thus
+      approaching the Gospels with the demand for historical arrangement?
+      And good, simple old Papias, of all people!
+
+      But if the Marcan plan was not laid down in "Ur-Markus," there is
+      nothing for it--since the plan was certainly not given in the
+      collection of Logia--but to ascribe it to the author of our Gospel of
+      Mark, to the man, that is, who wrote down for the first time these
+      "Pauline conceptions," those reflections of experiences of
+      individual believers and of the community, and inserted them into
+      the Gospel. It is proposed, then, to retain the outline which he has
+      given of the life of Jesus, and reject at the same time what he
+      relates. That is to say, he is to be believed where it is convenient
+      to believe him, and silenced where it is inconvenient. No more
+      complete refutation of the Marcan hypothesis could possibly be given
+      than this analysis, for it destroys its very foundation, the
+      confident acceptance of the historicity of the Marcan plan.
+
+      If there is to be an analysis of sources in Mark, then the Marcan
+      plan must be ascribed to "Ur-Markus," otherwise the analysis renders
+      the Markan hypothesis historically useless. But if "Ur-Markus" is to
+      be reconstructed on the basis of assigning to it the Marcan plan,
+      then we cannot separate the natural from the supernatural, for the
+      supernatural scenes, like the feeding of the multitude and the
+      transfiguration, are among the main features of the Marcan outline.
+
+      No hypothetical analysis of "Ur-Markus" has escaped this dilemma;
+      what it can effect by literary methods is historically useless, and
+      what would be historically useful cannot be attained nor "presented"
+      by literary methods.
+
+  235 Von Soden, for instance, germanises Jesus when he writes, "and this
+      nature is sound to the core. In spite of its inwardness there is no
+      trace of an exaggerated sentimentality. In spite of all the
+      intensity of prayer there is nothing of ecstasy or vision. No
+      apocalyptic dream-pictures find a lodging-place in His soul."
+
+      Is a man who teaches a world-renouncing ethic which sometimes soars
+      to the dizzy heights such as that of Matt. xix. 12, according to our
+      conceptions "sound to the core"? And does not the life of Jesus
+      present a number of occasions on which He seems to have been in an
+      ecstasy?
+
+      Thus, von Soden has not simply read his Jesus out of the texts, but
+      has added something of his own, and that something is Germanic in
+      colouring.
+
+  236 _i.e._ the MS. Life of Jesus written by Kai Jans, one of the
+      characters of the novel. The way in which the whole life-experience
+      of this character prepares him for the writing of the Life is
+      strikingly--if not always acceptably--worked out.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+  237 Frenssen's Kai Jans professes to have used the "results of the whole
+      range of critical investigation" in writing his work. Among the
+      books which he enumerates and recommends in the after-word, we miss
+      the works of Strauss, Weisse, Keim, Volkmar, and Brandt, and,
+      generally speaking, the names of those who in the past have done
+      something really great and original. Of the moderns, Johannes Weiss
+      is lacking. Wrede is mentioned, but is virtually ignored.
+      Pfleiderer's remarkable and profound presentation of Jesus in the
+      _Urchristentum_ (E. T. "Primitive Christianity," vol. ii., 1909) is
+      non-existent so far as he is concerned.
+
+  238 _Heimatkunst_, the ideal that every production of German art should
+      be racy of the soil. It has its relative justification as a protest
+      against the long subservience of some departments of German art to
+      French taste.--TRANSLATOR.
+
+  239 The Jesus of H. S. Chamberlain's _Worte Christi_, 1901, 286 pp., is
+      also modern. But the modernity is not so obtrusive, because he
+      describes only the teaching of Jesus, not His life.
+
+  240 Born in 1839 at Stettin. Studied at Tuebingen, was appointed
+      Professor in 1870 at Jena and in 1875 at Berlin. (Died 1908.)
+
+  241 _Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehren in geschichtlichem
+      Zusammenhang beschrieben._ 2nd ed. Berlin, 1902. Vol. i. (696 pp.),
+      615 ff.: _Die Predigt Jesu und der Glaube der Urgemeinde_ (English
+      Translation, "Primitive Christianity," chap. xvi.). Pfleiderer's
+      latest views are set forth in his work, based on academic lectures,
+      _Die Entstehung des Urchristentums_. (How Christianity arose.)
+      Munich, 1905. 255 pp.
+
+  242 Albert Kalthoff, _Das Christusproblem_. _Grundlinien zu einer
+      Sozialtheologie._ (The Problem of the Christ: Ground-plan of a
+      Social Theology.) Leipzig, 1902. 87 pp.
+
+      _Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue Beitraege zum
+      Christusproblem._ (How Christianity arose.) Leipzig, 1904. 155 pp.
+
+      Albert Kalthoff was born in 1850 at Barmen, and is engaged in
+      pastoral work in Bremen.
+
+  243 _Das Leben Jesu._ Lectures delivered before the Protestant Reform
+      Society at Berlin. Berlin, 1880. 173 pp.
+
+  244 If Kalthoff would only have spoken of the conception of the
+      resurrection instead of the conception of immortality! Then his
+      subjective knowledge would have been more or less tolerable.
+
+  245 Against Kalthoff: Wilhelm Bousset, _Was wissen wir von Jesus?_ (What
+      do we know about Jesus?) Lectures delivered before the
+      Protestantenverein at Bremen. Halle, 1904. 73 pp. In reply: Albert
+      Kalthoff, _Was wissen wir von Jesus?_ A settlement of accounts with
+      Professor Bousset. Berlin, 1904. 43 pp.
+
+      A sound historical position is set forth in the clear and trenchant
+      lecture of W. Kapp, _Das Christus- und Christentumsproblem bei
+      Kalthoff_. (The problem of the Christ and of Christianity as handled
+      by Kalthoff.) Strassburg, 1905. 23 pp.
+
+  246 Eduard von Hartmann, _Das Christentum des Neuen Testaments_. (The
+      Christianity of the N.T.) 2nd, revised and altered, edition of the
+      "Letters on the Christian Religion." Sachsa-in-the-Harz, 1905. 311
+      pp.
+
+  247 Eduard von Hartmann ought, therefore, to have given his assistance
+      to the others who have made this assertion in proving that there
+      really existed Messianic claimants before and at the time of Jesus.
+
+  248 "Jesus," by Juelicher, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_. (An
+      encyclopaedic publication which is appearing in parts.) Teubner,
+      Berlin, 1905, pp. 40-69.
+
+      See also W. Bousset, "Jesus," _Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbuecher_.
+      (A series of religious-historical monographs.) Published by Schiele,
+      Halle, 1904.
+
+      Here should be mentioned also the thoughtful book, following very
+      much the lines of Juelicher, by Eduard Grimm, entitled _Die Ethik
+      Jesu_, Hamburg, 1903, 288 pp. The author, born in 1848, is the chief
+      pastor at the Nicolaikirche in Hamburg.
+
+      Another work which deserves mention is Arno Neumann, _Jesu wie er
+      geschichtlich war_ (Jesus as he historically existed), Freiburg,
+      1904, 198 pp. (New Paths to the Old God), a Life of Jesus
+      distinguished by a lofty vein of natural poetry and based upon solid
+      theological knowledge. Arno Neumann is headmaster of a school at
+      Apolda.
+
+  249 _Jeschua. Der klassische juedische Mann. Zerstoerung des kirchlichen,
+      Enthuellung des juedischen Jesus-Bildes._ Berlin, 1904, 112 pp.
+      Earlier studies of the Life of Jesus from the Jewish point of view
+      had been less ambitious. Dr. Aug. Wuensche had written in 1872 on
+      "Jesus in His attitude towards women" from the Talmudic standpoint
+      (146 pp.), and had described Him from the same standpoint as a Jesus
+      who rejoiced in life, _Der lebensfreudige Jesus der synoptischen
+      Evangelien im Gegensatz zum leidenden Messias der Kirche_. Leipzig,
+      1876, 444 pp. The basis is so far correct, that the eschatological,
+      world-renouncing ethic which we find in Jesus was due to temporary
+      conditions and is therefore transitory, and had nothing whatever to
+      do with Judaism as such. The spirit of the Law is the opposite of
+      world-renouncing. But the Talmud, be its traditions never so
+      trustworthy, could teach us little about Jesus because it has
+      preserved scarcely a trace of that eschatological phase of Jewish
+      religion and ethics.
+
+  250 Wolfgang Kirchbach, _Was lehrte Jesus? Zwei Urevangelien_. Berlin,
+      1897, 248 pp.; second greatly enlarged and improved edition, 1902,
+      339 pp. By the same author, _Das Buch Jesus_. _Die Urevangelien. Neu
+      nachgewiesen, neu uebersetzt, geordnet und aus der Ursprache
+      erklaert_. (The Book of Jesus. The Primitive Gospels. Newly traced,
+      translated, arranged, and explained on the basis of the original.)
+      Berlin, 1897.
+
+  251 Before him, Hugo Delff, in his _History of the Rabbi Jesus of
+      Nazareth_ (Leipzig, 1889, 428 pp.), had confined himself to the
+      Fourth Gospel, and even within that Gospel he drew some critical
+      distinctions. His Jesus at first conceals His Messiahship from the
+      fear of arousing the political expectations of the people, and
+      speaks to them of the Son of Man in the third person. At His second
+      visit to Jerusalem He breaks with the rulers, is subsequently
+      compelled, in consequence of the conflict over the Sabbath, to leave
+      Galilee, and then gives up His own people and turns to the heathen.
+      Delff explains the raising of Lazarus by supposing him to have been
+      buried in a state of trance.
+
+  252 Albert Dulk, _Der Irrgang des Lebens Jesu_. _In geschichtlicher
+      Aufassung dargestellt. Erster Teil: Die historischen Wurzeln und die
+      galilaeische Bluete_, 1884. 395 pp. _Zweiter Teil: Der Messiaseinzug
+      und die Erhebung ans Kreuz_, 1885, 302 pp. (The Error of the Life of
+      Jesus. Historically apprehended and set forth. Pt. i., The
+      Historical Roots and the Galilaean Blossom. Pt. ii., The Messianic
+      Entry and the Crucifixion.) The course of Dulk's own life was
+      somewhat erratic. Born in 1819, he came prominently forward in the
+      revolution of 1848, as a political pamphleteer and agitator. Later,
+      though almost without means, he undertook long journeys, even to
+      Sinai and to Lapland. Finally, he worked as a social democratic
+      reformer. He died in 1884.
+
+  253 A scientific treatment of this subject is supplied by Fr. Nippold,
+      _Die psychiatrische Seite der Heilstaetigkeit Jesu_ (The Psychiatric
+      Side of Jesus' Works of Healing), 1889, in which a luminous review
+      of the medical material is to be found. See also Dr. K. Kunz,
+      _Christus medicus_, Freiburg in Baden, 1905, 74 pp. The scientific
+      value of this work is, however, very much reduced by the fact that
+      the author has no acquaintance with the preliminary questions
+      belonging to the sphere of history and literature, and regards all
+      the miracles of healing as actual events, believing himself able to
+      explain them from the medical point of view. The tendency of the
+      work is mainly apologetic.
+
+  254 _Jesus von Nazareth. Described from the Scientific, Historical, and
+      Social Point of View._ Translated from the French (into German) by
+      A. Just. Leipzig, 1894. The author, whose real name is P. A.
+      Desjardin, is a practising physician. De Regla, too, makes the
+      Fourth Gospel the basis of his narrative.
+
+  255 Pierre Nahor (Emilie Lerou), _Jesus_. Translated from the French by
+      Walter Bloch. Berlin, 1905. Its motto is: The figure of Jesus
+      belongs, like all mysterious, heroic, or mythical figures, to legend
+      and poetry. In the introduction we find the statement, "This book is
+      a confession of faith." The narrative is based on the Fourth Gospel.
+
+  256 _La Vie inconnue de Jesus-Christ._ Paris, 1894. 301 pp. German,
+      under the title _Die Luecke im Leben Jesu_ (The Gap in the Life of
+      Jesus). Stuttgart, 1894. 186 pp. See Holtzmann in the _Theol.
+      Jahresbericht_, xiv. p. 140.
+
+      In a certain limited sense the work of A. Lillie, _The Influence of
+      Buddhism on Primitive Christianity_ (London, 1893), is to be
+      numbered among the fictitious works on the life of Jesus. The
+      fictitious element consists in Jesus being made an Essene by the
+      writer, and Essenism equated with Buddhism.
+
+      Among "edifying" romances on the life of Jesus intended for family
+      reading, that of the English writer J. H. Ingraham, _The Prince of
+      the House of David_, has had a very long lease of life. It appeared
+      in a German translation as early as 1858, and was reissued in 1906
+      (Brunswick).
+
+      A fictitious life of Jesus of wonderful beauty is Peter Rosegger's
+      _I.N.R.I. Frohe Botschaft eines armen Suenders_ (The Glad Tidings of
+      a poor Sinner). Leipzig, 6th-10th thousand, 1906. 293 pp.
+
+      A feminine point of view reveals itself in C. Rauch's _Jeschua ben
+      Joseph_. Deichert, 1899.
+
+  257 _La Vie esoterique de Jesu-Christ et les origines orientales du
+      christianisme._ Paris, 1902. 445 pp.
+
+      That Jesus was of Aryan race is argued by A. Mueller, who assumes a
+      Gaulish immigration into Galilee. _Jesus ein Arier._ Leipzig, 1904.
+      74 pp.
+
+  258 _Did Jesus live 100 __B.C.__?_ London and Benares. Theosophical
+      Publishing Society, 1903. 440 pp.
+
+      A scientific discussion of the "Toledoth Jeshu," with citations from
+      the Talmudic tradition concerning Jesus, is offered by S. Krauss,
+      _Das Leben Jesu nach juedischen Quellen_, 1902. 309 pp. According to
+      him the _Toledoth Jeshu_ was committed to writing in the fifth
+      century, and he is of opinion that the Jewish legend is only a
+      modified version of the Christian tradition.
+
+  259 William Wrede, born in 1859 at Buecken in Hanover, was Professor at
+      Breslau. (He died in 1907.)
+
+      Wrede names as his real predecessors on the same lines Bruno Bauer,
+      Volkmar, and the Dutch writer Hoekstra ("De Christologie van het
+      canonieke Marcus-Evangelie, vergeleken met die van de beide andere
+      synoptische Evangelien," _Theol. Tijdschrift_, v., 1871).
+
+      In a certain limited degree the work of Ernest Havet (_Le
+      Christianisme et ses origines_) has a claim to be classed in the
+      same category. His scepticism refers principally to the entry into
+      Jerusalem and the story of the passion.
+
+  260 These and the following questions are raised more especially in the
+      _Sketch of the Life of Jesus_.
+
+  261 It would perhaps be more historical to say "as a prophet."
+
+  262 The difficulties which the incident at Caesarea Philippi places in
+      the way of Wrede's construction may be realised by placing two of
+      his statements side by side. P. 101: "From this it is evident that
+      this incident contains no element which cannot be easily understood
+      on the basis of Mark's ideas." P. 238: "But in another aspect this
+      incident stands in direct contradiction to the Marcan view of the
+      disciples. It is inconsistent with their general 'want of
+      understanding,' and can therefore hardly have been created by Mark
+      himself."
+
+  263 The question of the attitude of pre-Origenic theology towards the
+      historical Jesus, and of the influence exercised by dogma upon the
+      evangelical tradition regarding Jesus in the course of the first two
+      centuries, is certainly deserving of a detailed examination.
+
+  264 Certain of the conceptions with which Wrede operates are simply not
+      in accordance with the text, because he gives them a different
+      significance from that which they have in the narrative. Thus, for
+      example, he always takes the "resurrection," when it occurs in the
+      mouth of Jesus, as a reference to that resurrection which as an
+      historical fact became a matter of apprehended experience to the
+      apostles. But Jesus speaks without any distinction of His
+      resurrection and of His Parousia. The conception of the
+      resurrection, therefore, if one is to arrive at it inductively from
+      the Marcan text, is most closely bound up with the Parousia. The
+      Evangelist would thus seem to have made Jesus predict a different
+      kind of resurrection from that which actually happened. The
+      resurrection, according to the Marcan text, is an eschatological
+      event, and has no reference whatever to Wrede's "historical
+      resurrection." Further, if their resurrection experience was the
+      first and fundamental point in the Messianic enlightenment of the
+      disciples, why did they only begin to proclaim it some weeks later?
+      This is a problem which was long ago recognised by Reimarus, and
+      which is not solved by merely assuming that the disciples were
+      afraid.
+
+  265 P. 33 ff. The prohibitions in Mark i. 43 and 44, v. 43, vii. 36, and
+      viii. 26 are put on the same footing with the really Messianic
+      prohibitions in viii. 30 and ix. 9, with which may be associated
+      also the imposition of silence upon the demoniacs who recognise his
+      Messiahship in Mark i. 34 and iii. 12.
+
+  266 The narrative in Matt. xiv. 22-33, according to which the disciples,
+      after seeing Jesus walk upon the sea, hail Him on His coming into
+      the boat as the Son of God, and the description of the deeds of
+      Jesus as "deeds of Christ," in the introduction to the Baptist's
+      question in Matt. xi. 2, do not cancel the old theory even in
+      Matthew, because the Synoptists, differing therein from the fourth
+      Evangelist, do not represent the demand for a sign as a demand for a
+      Messianic sign, nor the cures wrought by Jesus as Messianic proofs
+      of power. The action of the demons in crying out upon Jesus as the
+      Son of God betokens their recognition of Him; it has nothing to do
+      with the miracles of healing as such.
+
+  267 For further examples of the pressing of the theory to its utmost
+      limits, see Wrede, p. 134 ff.
+
+  268 It is always assumed as self-evident that Jesus is speaking of the
+      sufferings and persecutions which would take place after His death,
+      or that the Evangelist, in making Him speak in this way, is thinking
+      of these later persecutions. There is no hint of that in the text.
+
+  269 That the eschatological school showed a certain timidity in drawing
+      the consequences of its recognition of the character of the
+      preaching of Jesus and examining the tradition from the
+      eschatological standpoint can be seen from Johannes Weiss's work,
+      "The Earliest Gospel" (_Das aelteste Evangelium_), Goettingen, 1903,
+      414 pp. Ingenious and interesting as this work is in detail, one is
+      surprised to find the author of the "Preaching of Jesus" here
+      endeavouring to distinguish between Mark and "Ur-Markus," to point
+      to examples of Pauline influence, to exhibit clearly the
+      "tendencies" which guided, respectively, the original Evangelist and
+      the redactor--all this as if he did not possess in his eschatological
+      view of the preaching of Jesus a dominant conception which gives him
+      a clue to quite a different psychology from that which he actually
+      applies. Against Wrede he brings forward many arguments which are
+      worthy of attention, but he can hardly be said to have refuted him,
+      because it is impossible for Weiss to treat the question in the
+      exact form in which it was raised by Wrede.
+
+  270 Wrede certainly goes too far in asserting that even in Mark's
+      version the experience at the baptism is conceived as an open
+      miracle, perceptible to others. The way in which the revelations to
+      the prophets are recounted in the Old Testament does not make in
+      favour of this. Otherwise we should have to suppose that the
+      Evangelist described the incident as a miracle which took place in
+      the presence of a multitude without perceiving that in this case the
+      Messianic secret was a secret no longer. If so, the story of the
+      baptism stands on the same footing as the story of the Messianic
+      entry: it is a revelation of the Messiahship which has absolutely no
+      results.
+
+  271 The statement of Mark that Jesus, coming out of the north, appeared
+      for a moment again in Decapolis and Capernaum, and then started off
+      to the north once more (Mark vii. 31-viii. 27), may here
+      provisionally be left out of account since it stands in relation
+      with the twofold account of the feeding of the multitude. So too the
+      enigmatic appearance and disappearance of the people (Mark viii.
+      34-ix. 30) may here be passed over. These statements make no
+      difference to the fact that Jesus really broke off his work in
+      Galilee shortly after the Mission of the Twelve, since they imply at
+      most a quite transient contact with the people.
+
+  272 On the theory of the successful and unsuccessful periods in the work
+      of Jesus see the "Sketch," p. 3 ff., "The four Pre-suppositions of
+      the Modern Historical Solution."
+
+  273 Weisse found that there was no hint in the sources of the desertion
+      of the people, since according to these, Jesus was opposed only by
+      the Pharisees, not by the people. The abandonment of the Galilaean
+      work, and the departure to Jerusalem, must, he thought, have been
+      due to some unrecorded fact which revealed to Jesus that the time
+      had come to act in this way. Perhaps, he adds, it was the waning of
+      Jesus' miracle-working power which caused the change in His
+      attitude, since it is remarkable that He performed no further
+      miracles during His sojourn at Jerusalem.
+
+  274 The most logical attitude in regard to it is Bousset's, who proposes
+      to treat the mission and everything connected with it as a "confused
+      and unintelligible" tradition.
+
+  275 Joel iii. 13, "Put in the sickle for the harvest is ripe!" In the
+      Apocalypse of John, too, the Last Judgment is described as the
+      heavenly harvest: "Thrust in thy sickle and reap; for the time is
+      come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe. And he
+      that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the
+      earth was reaped" (Rev. xiv. 15 and 16).
+
+      The most remarkable parallel to the discourse at the sending forth
+      of the disciples is offered by the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch:
+      "Behold, the days come, when the time of the world shall be ripe,
+      and the harvest of the sowing of the good and of the evil shall
+      come, when the Almighty shall bring upon the earth and upon its
+      inhabitants and upon their rulers confusion of spirit and terror
+      that makes the heart stand still; and they shall hate one another
+      and provoke one another to war; and the despised shall have power
+      over them of reputation, and the mean shall exalt themselves over
+      them that are highly esteemed. And the many shall be at the mercy of
+      the few ... and all who shall be saved and shall escape the before-
+      mentioned (dangers) ... shall be given into the hands of my servant,
+      the Messiah." (Cap. lxx. 2, 3, 9. Following the translation of E.
+      Kautzsch.)
+
+      The connexion between the ideas of harvest and of judgment was
+      therefore one of the stock features of the apocalyptic writings. And
+      as the Apocalypse of Baruch dates from the period about A.D. 70, it
+      may be assumed that this association of ideas was also current in
+      the Jewish apocalyptic of the time of Jesus. Here is a basis for
+      understanding the secret of the Kingdom of God in the parables of
+      sowing and reaping historically and in accordance with the ideas of
+      the time. What Jesus did was to make known to those who understood
+      Him that the coming earthly harvest was the last, and was also the
+      token of the coming heavenly harvest. The eschatological
+      interpretation is immensely strengthened by these parallels.
+
+  276 With what right does modern critical theology tear apart even the
+      discourse in Matt. xi. in order to make the "cry of jubilation" into
+      the cry with which Jesus saluted the return of His disciples, and to
+      find lodgment for the woes upon Chorazin and Bethsaida somewhere
+      else in an appropriately gloomy context? Is not all this apparently
+      disconnected material held together by an inner bond of
+      connexion--the secret of the Kingdom of God which is imminently
+      impending over Jesus and the people? Or, is Jesus expected to preach
+      like one who has a thesis to maintain and seeks about for the most
+      logical arrangement? Does not a certain lack of orderly connexion
+      belong to the very idea of prophetic speech?
+
+  277 If, therefore, Jesus at a later point predicted to His disciples His
+      resurrection, He means by that, not a single isolated act, but a
+      complex occurrence consisting of His metamorphosis, translation to
+      heaven, and Parousia as the Son of Man. And with this is associated
+      the general eschatological resurrection of the dead. It is,
+      therefore, one and the same thing whether He speaks of His
+      resurrection or of His coming on the clouds of heaven.
+
+  278 The title of Baldensperger's book, _The Self-consciousness of Jesus
+      in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His Time_, really contains a
+      promise which is impossible of fulfilment. The contemporary
+      "Messianic hopes" can only explain the hopes of Jesus so far as they
+      corresponded thereto, not His view of His own Person, in which He is
+      absolutely original.
+
+  279 Even Baldensperger's book, _Die messianisch-apokalyptischen
+      Hoffnungen des Judentums_ (1903), passes at a stride from the Psalms
+      of Solomon to Fourth Ezra. The coming volume is to deal with the
+      eschatology of Jesus. That is a "theological," but not an historical
+      division of the material. The second volume should properly come in
+      the middle of the first.
+
+  280 The fact that in the Psalms of Solomon the Messiah is designated by
+      the ancient prophetic name of the Son of David is significant of the
+      rising influence of the ancient prophetic literature. This
+      designation has nothing whatever to do with a political ideal of a
+      kingly Messiah. This Davidic King and his Kingdom are, in their
+      character and the manner of their coming, every whit as supernatural
+      as the Son of Man and His coming. The same historical fact was read
+      into both Daniel and the prophets.
+
+  281 Enoch is an offshoot of the Danielic apocalyptic writings. The
+      earliest portion, the Apocalypse of the Ten Weeks, is independent of
+      Daniel and of contemporary origin. The Similitudes (capp.
+      xxxvii.-lxix.), which, with their description of the Judgment of the
+      Son of Man, are so important in connexion with the thoughts of
+      Jesus, may be placed in 80-70 B.C. They do not presuppose the taking
+      of Jerusalem by Pompey.
+
+  282 The Psalms of Solomon are therefore a decade later than the
+      Similitudes.
+
+  283 The Apocalypse of Baruch seems to have been composed not very long
+      after the Fall of Jerusalem. Fourth Ezra is twenty to thirty years
+      later.
+
+  284 The Psalms of Solomon form the last document of Jewish eschatology
+      before the coming of the Baptist. For almost a hundred years, from
+      60 B.C. until A.D. 30, we have no information regarding
+      eschatological movements! And do the Psalms of Solomon really point
+      to a deep eschatological movement at the time of the taking of
+      Jerusalem by Pompey? Hardly, I think. It is to be noticed in
+      studying the times of Jesus that the surrounding circumstances have
+      no eschatological character. The Fall of Jerusalem marks the next
+      turning-point in the history of the apocalyptic hope, as Baruch and
+      Fourth Ezra show.
+
+  285 Jesus promises them expressly that at the appearing of the Son of
+      Man they shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of
+      Israel (Matt. xix. 28). It is to their part in the judgment that
+      belong also the authority to bind and to loose which He entrusts to
+      them--first to Peter personally (Matt. xvi. 19) and afterwards to all
+      the Twelve (Matt. xviii. 18)--in such a way, too, that their present
+      decisions will be somehow or other binding at the Judgment. Or does
+      the "upon earth" refer only to the fact that the Messianic Last
+      Judgment will be held on earth? "I give unto thee the Keys of the
+      Kingdom of Heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be
+      bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be
+      loosed in heaven" (Matt. xvi. 19). Why should these words not be
+      historical? Is it because in the same context Jesus speaks of the
+      "church" which He will found upon the Rock-disciple? But if one has
+      once got a clear idea from Paul, a Clement, the Epistle to the
+      Hebrews, and the Shepherd of Hermas, what the pre-existing "church"
+      was which was to appear in the last times, it will no longer appear
+      impossible that Jesus might have spoken of the church against which
+      the gates of hell shall not prevail. Of course, if the passage is
+      given an uneschatological reference to the Church as we know it, it
+      loses all real meaning and becomes a treasure-trove to the Roman
+      Catholic exegete, and a terror to the Protestant.
+
+  286 That he could be taken for the Baptist risen from the dead shows how
+      short a time before the death of the Baptist His ministry had begun.
+      He only became known, as the Baptist's question shows, at the time
+      of the mission of the disciples; Herod first heard of Him after the
+      death of the Baptist. Had he known anything of Jesus beforehand, it
+      would have been impossible for him suddenly to identify Him with the
+      Baptist risen from the dead. This elementary consideration has been
+      overlooked in all calculations of the length of the public ministry
+      of Jesus.
+
+  287 That had been rightly remarked by Colani. Later, however, theology
+      lost sight of the fact because it did not know how to make any
+      historical use of it.
+
+  288 Psal. Sol. xv. 8.
+
+  289 That the baptism of John was essentially an act which gave a claim
+      to something future may be seen from the fact that Jesus speaks of
+      His sufferings and death as a special baptism, and asks the sons of
+      Zebedee whether they are willing, for the sake of gaining the
+      thrones on His right hand and His left, to undergo this baptism. If
+      the baptism of John had had no real sacramental significance it
+      would be unintelligible that Jesus should use this metaphor.
+
+  290 The thought of the Messianic feast is found in Isaiah lv. 1 ff. and
+      lxv. 12 ff. It is very strongly marked in Isa. xxv. 6-8, a passage
+      which perhaps dates from the time of Alexander the Great, "and
+      Jahweh of Hosts will prepare upon this mountain for all peoples a
+      feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things
+      prepared with marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. He shall
+      destroy, in this mountain, among all peoples, the veil which has
+      veiled all peoples and the covering which has covered all nations.
+      He shall destroy death for ever, and the Lord Jahweh shall wipe away
+      the tears from off all faces; and the reproach of His people shall
+      disappear from the earth." (The German follows Kautzsch's
+      translation.)
+
+      In Enoch xxiv. and xxv. the conception of the Messianic feast is
+      connected with that of the tree of life which shall offer its fruits
+      to the elect upon the mountain of the King. Similarly in the
+      Testament of Levi, cap. xviii. 11.
+
+      The decisive passage is in Enoch lxii. 14. After the Parousia of the
+      Son of Man, and after the Judgment, the elect who have been saved
+      "shall eat with the Son of Man, shall sit down and rise up with Him
+      to all eternity."
+
+      Jesus' references to the Messianic feast are therefore not merely
+      images, but point to a reality. In Matt. viii. 11 and 12 He
+      prophesies that many shall come from the East and from the West to
+      sit at meat with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Matt. xxii. 1-14 the
+      Messianic feast is pictured as a royal marriage, in Matt. xxv. 1-13
+      as a marriage feast.
+
+      The Apocalypse is dominated by the thought of the feast in all its
+      forms. In Rev. ii. 7 it appears in connexion with the thought of the
+      tree of life; in ii. 17 it is pictured as a feeding with manna; in
+      iii. 21 it is the feast which the Lord will celebrate with His
+      followers; in vii. 16, 17 there is an allusion to the Lamb who shall
+      feed His own so that they shall no more hunger or thirst; chapter
+      xix. describes the marriage feast of the Lamb.
+
+      The Messianic feast therefore played a dominant part in the
+      conception of blessedness from Enoch to the Apocalypse of John. From
+      this we can estimate what sacramental significance a guarantee of
+      taking part in that feast must have had. The meaning of the
+      celebration was obvious in itself, and was made manifest in the
+      conduct of it. The sacramental effect was wholly independent of the
+      apprehension and comprehension of the recipient. Therefore, in this
+      also the meal at the lake-side was a true sacrament.
+
+  291 Weisse rightly remarks that the task of the historian in dealing
+      with Mark must consist in explaining how such "myths" could be
+      accepted by a chronicler who stood so relatively near the events as
+      our Mark does.
+
+  292 It is to be noticed that the cry of Jesus from the cross, "Eli,
+      Eli," was immediately interpreted by the bystanders as referring to
+      Elias.
+
+  293 From this difficulty we can see, too, how impossible it was for any
+      of them to have "arrived gradually at the knowledge of the
+      Messiahship of Jesus."
+
+  294 For the hypothesis of the two sets of narratives which have been
+      worked into one another, see the "Sketch of the Life of Jesus,"
+      1901, p. 52 ff., "After the Mission of the Disciples. Literary and
+      historical problems." A theory resting on the same principle was
+      lately worked out in detail by Johannes Weiss, _Das aelteste
+      Evangelium_ (The Earliest Gospel), 1903, p. 205 ff.
+
+  295 It is typical of the constant agreement of the critical conclusions
+      in thoroughgoing scepticism and thoroughgoing eschatology that Wrede
+      also observes: "The transfiguration and Peter's confession are
+      closely connected in content" (p. 123). He also clearly perceives
+      the inconsistency in the fact that Peter at Caesarea Philippi gives
+      evidence of possessing a knowledge which he and his fellow-disciples
+      do not show elsewhere (p. 119), but the fact that it is Peter, not
+      Jesus, who reveals the Messianic secret, constitutes a very serious
+      difficulty for Wrede's reading of the facts, since this assumes
+      Jesus to have been the revealer of it.
+
+  296 "After these years shall my Son, the Christ, die, together with all
+      who have the breath of men. Then shall the Age be changed into the
+      primeval silence; seven days, as at the first beginning so that no
+      man shall be left. After seven days shall the Age, which now sleeps,
+      awake, and perishability shall itself perish."
+
+  297 Difficult problems are involved in the prediction of the
+      resurrection in Mark xiv. 28. Jesus there promises His disciples
+      that He will "go before them" into Galilee. That cannot mean that He
+      will go alone into Galilee before them, and that they shall there
+      meet with Him, their risen Master; what He contemplates is that He
+      shall return _with_ them, at their head, from Jerusalem to Galilee.
+      Was it that the manifestation of the Son of Man and of the Judgment
+      should take place there? So much is clear: the saying, far from
+      directing the disciples to go away to Galilee, chains them to
+      Jerusalem, there to await Him who should lead them home. It should
+      not therefore be claimed as supporting the tradition of the
+      Galilaean appearances.
+
+      We find it "corrected" by the saying of the "young man" at the
+      grave, who says to the women, "Go, tell His disciples and Peter that
+      He goeth before you into Galilee. There shall ye see Him as He said
+      unto you."
+
+      Here then the idea of following in point of time is foisted upon the
+      words "he goeth before you," whereas in the original the word has a
+      purely local sense, corresponding to the {~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH VARIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH PSILI AND PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH DASIA~}
+      {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} in Mark x. 32.
+
+      But the correction is itself meaningless since the visions took
+      place in Jerusalem. We have therefore in this passage a more
+      detailed indication of the way in which Jesus thought of the events
+      subsequent to His Resurrection. The interpretation of this
+      unfulfilled saying is, however, wholly impossible for us: it was not
+      less so for the earliest tradition, as is shown by the attempt to
+      give it a meaning by the "correction."
+
+  298 Here it is evident also from the form taken by the prophecy of the
+      sufferings that the section Mark viii. 34 ff. cannot possibly come
+      after the revelation at Caesarea Philippi, since in it, it is the
+      thought of the general sufferings which is implied. For the same
+      reason the predictions of suffering and tribulation in the Synoptic
+      Apocalypse in Mark xiii. cannot be derived from Jesus.
+
+  299 Weisse and Bruno Bauer had long ago pointed out how curious it was
+      that Jesus in the sayings about His sufferings spoke of "many"
+      instead of speaking of "His own" or "the believers." Weisse found in
+      the words the thought that Jesus died for the nation as a whole;
+      Bruno Bauer that the "for many" in the words of Jesus was derived
+      from the view of the later theology of the Christian community. This
+      explanation is certainly wrong, for so soon as the words of Jesus
+      come into any kind of contact with early theology the "many"
+      disappear to give place to the "believers." In the Pauline words of
+      institution the form is: My body for you (1 Cor. xi. 24).
+
+      Johannes Weiss follows in the footsteps of Weisse when he interprets
+      the "many" as the nation (_Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes_, 2nd
+      ed., 1909, p. 201). He gives however, quite a false turn to this
+      interpretation by arguing that the "many" cannot include the
+      disciples, since they "who in faith and penitence have received the
+      tidings of the Kingdom of God no longer need a special means of
+      deliverance such as this." They are the chosen, to them the Kingdom
+      is assured. But a ransom, a special means of salvation, is needful
+      for the mass of the people, who in their blindness have incurred the
+      guilt of rejecting the Messiah. For this grave sin, which is,
+      nevertheless, to some extent excused as due to ignorance, there is a
+      unique atoning sacrifice, the death of the Messiah.
+
+      This theory is based on a distinction of which there is no hint in
+      the teaching of Jesus; and it takes no account of the
+      predestinarianism which is an integral part of eschatology, and
+      which, in fact, dominated the thoughts of Jesus. The Lord is
+      conscious that He dies only for the elect. For others His death can
+      avail nothing, nor even their own repentance. Moreover, He does not
+      die in order that this one or that one may come into the Kingdom of
+      God; He provides the atonement in order that the Kingdom itself may
+      come. Until the Kingdom comes even the elect cannot possess it.
+
+  300 One might use it as a principle of division by which to classify the
+      lives of Jesus, whether they make Him go to Jerusalem to work or to
+      die. Here as in so many other places Weisse's clearness of
+      perception is surprising. Jesus' journey was according to him a
+      pilgrimage to death, not to the Passover.
+
+  301 "That ye enter not into temptation" is the content of the prayer
+      that they are to offer while watching with Him.
+
+  302 As long ago as 1880, H. W. Bleby (_The Trial of Jesus considered as
+      a Judicial Act_) had emphasised this circumstance as significant.
+      The injustice in the trial of Jesus consisted, according to him, in
+      the fact that He was condemned on His own admission without any
+      witnesses being called. Dalman, it is true, will not admit that this
+      technical error was very serious.
+
+      But the really important point is not whether the condemnation was
+      legal or not; it is the significant fact that the High Priest called
+      no witnesses. Why did he not call any? This question was obscured
+      for Bleby and Dalman by other problems.
+
+  303 That would have been to utter a heresy which would alone have
+      sufficed to secure His condemnation. It would certainly have been
+      brought up as a charge against Him.
+
+  304 When it is assumed that the Messianic claims of Jesus were generally
+      known during those last days at Jerusalem there is a temptation to
+      explain the absence of witnesses in regard to them by supposing that
+      they were too much a matter of common knowledge to require evidence.
+      But in that case why should the High Priest not have fulfilled the
+      prescribed formalities? Why make such efforts first to establish a
+      different charge? Thus the obscure and unintelligible procedure at
+      the trial of Jesus becomes in the end the clearest proof that the
+      public knew nothing of the Messiahship of Jesus.
+
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS***
+
+
+
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+April 16, 2014
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