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 dé 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, Weizsäcker, 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
Weizsäcker, 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
Weizsäcker, 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
_Timothée Colani._ Jésus‐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 Erzählern. (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.
Göttingen. 67 pp. Second revised and enlarged edition, 1900, 210
pp.