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, _Jésus‐Christ et les
croyances messianiques de son temps_.
Timothée Colani was born in 1824 at Lemé (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.
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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 naïve 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.
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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,
Weizsäcker, 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 Weizsäcker’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 παλιγγενεσία, 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.