Christentums auf Grund einer Kritik der Berichte über 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 Jülicher._ 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
manœuvred 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 Réville in his _Jésus
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 rôle 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.