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 _naïveté_. 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 rôle, 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 Schürer 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, Schürer 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 Schürer, 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.