Jesus was a teacher; not only so, but He took disciples in order to train
them to be teachers. “This is in itself sufficient to show there was a
period in His life in which His work was not determined by the thought of
the immediate nearness of the decisive moment. He sought men, therefore,
who might become His fellow‐workers. He began to train disciples who, if
He did not Himself live to see the Day of the Lord, would be able after
His death to carry on the work of educating the people along the lines
which He had laid down.” “Then there occurred in Judaea an event of which
the rumour spread like wildfire throughout Palestine. A prophet arose—a
thing which had not happened for centuries—a man who came forward as an
envoy of God; and this prophet proclaimed the immediate coming of the
reign of God: ‘Repent that ye may escape the wrath of God.’ ” The
Baptist’s great sermon on repentance falls, according to Brandt, in the
last period of the life of Jesus. We must assume, he thinks, that before
John came forward in this dramatic fashion he had been a teacher, and at
that period of his life had numbered Jesus among his pupils. Nevertheless
his life previous to his public appearance must have been a rather obscure
one. When he suddenly launched out into this eschatological preaching of
repentance “he seemed like an Elijah who had long ago been rapt away from
the earth and now appeared once more.”
From this point onwards Jesus had to concentrate His activity, for the
time was short. If He desired to effect anything and so far as possible to
make the people, before the coming of the end, obedient to the will of
God, He must make Jerusalem the starting‐point of His work. “Only from
this central position, and only with the help of an authority which had at
its disposal the whole synagogal system, could He effect within a short
time much, perhaps all, of what was needful. So He determined on
journeying to Jerusalem with this end in view, and with the fixed resolve
there to carry into effect the will of God.”
The journey to Jerusalem was not therefore a pilgrimage of death. “So long
as we are obliged to take the Gospels as a true reflection of the history
of Jesus we must recognise with Weizsäcker that Jesus did not go to
Jerusalem in order to be put to death there, nor did He go to keep the
Feast. Both suppositions are excluded by the vigour of his action in
Jerusalem, and the bright colours of hope with which the picture of that
period was painted in the recollection of those who had witnessed it.” We
cannot therefore regard the predictions of the Passion as historical, or
“at most we might perhaps suppose that Jesus in the consciousness of His
innocence may have said to His disciples: ’If I should die, may God for
the sake of My blood be merciful to you and to the people.’”
He went to Jerusalem, then, to fulfil the will of God. “It was God’s will
that the preaching by which alone the people could be inwardly renewed and
made into a real people of God should be recognised and organised by the
national and religious authorities. To effect this through the existing
authorities, or to realise it in some other way, such was the task which
Jesus felt Himself called on to perform.” With his eyes upon this goal,
behind which lay the near approach of the Kingdom of God, He set His face
towards Jerusalem.
“But nothing could be more natural than that out of the belief that He was
engaged in a work which God had willed, there should arise an ever
stronger belief in His personal vocation.” It was thus that the Messianic
consciousness entered into Jesus’ thoughts. His conviction of His vocation
had nothing to do with a political Messiahship, it was only gradually from
the development of events that He was able to draw the inference that He
was destined to the Messianic sovereignty, “it may have become more and
more clear to Him, but it did not become a matter of absolute certainty.”
It was only amid opposition, in deep dejection, in consequence of a
powerful inner reaction against circumstances, that He came to recognise
Himself with full conviction as the anointed of God.
When it began to be bruited about that He was the Messiah, the rulers had
Him arrested and handed Him over to the Procurator. Judas the traitor “had
only been a short time among His followers, and only in those unquiet days
at Jerusalem when the Master had scarcely any opportunity for private
intercourse with him and for learning really to know him. He had not been
with Jesus during the Galilaean days, and Jesus was consequently nothing
more to him than the future ruler of the Kingdom of God.”
After His death the disciples “could not, unless something occurred to
restore their faith, continue to believe in His Messiahship.” Jesus had
taken away with Him in His death the hopes which they had set upon Him,
especially as He had not foretold His death, much less His resurrection.
“At first, therefore, it would be all in favour of His memory if the
disciples remembered that He Himself had never openly and definitely
declared Himself to be the Messiah.” They returned to Galilee. “Simon
Peter, and perhaps the son of Zebedee, who afterwards ranked along with
him as a pillar of the Church, resolved to continue that preparation for
their work which had been interrupted by their journey to Jerusalem. It
seemed to them that if they were once more on Galilaean soil the days
which they had spent in the inhospitable Jerusalem would cease to oppress
their spirits with the leaden weight of sorrowful recollection.... One
might almost say that they had to make up their minds to give up Jesus the
author of the attempt to take Jerusalem by storm; but for Jesus the
gracious gentle Galilaean teacher they kept a warm place in their hearts.”
So love watched over the dead until hope was rekindled by the Old
Testament promises and came to reawaken Him. “The first who, in an
enthusiastic vision, saw this wish fulfilled was Simon Peter.” This
“resurrection” has nothing to do with the empty grave, which, like the
whole narrative of the Jerusalem appearances, only came into the tradition
later. The first appearances took place in Galilee. It was there that the
Church was founded.
This attempt to grasp the connexion of events in the life of Jesus from a
purely historical point of view is one of the most important that have
ever been made in this department of study. If it had been put in a purely
constructive form, this criticism would have made an impression unequalled
by any other Life of Jesus since Renan’s. But in that case it would have
lost that free play of ideas which the critical recognition of the
unbridged gap admits. The eschatological question is not, it is true,
decided by this investigation. It shows the impossibility of the previous
attempts to establish a present Messiahship of Jesus, but it shows, too,
that the questions, which are really historical questions, concerning the
public attitude of Jesus, are far from being solved by asserting the
exclusively eschatological character of His preaching, but that new
difficulties are always presenting themselves.
It was perhaps not so much through these general ethico‐religious
historical discussions as in consequence of certain exegetical problems
which unexpectedly came to light that theologians became conscious that
the old conception of the teaching of Jesus was not tenable, or was only
tenable by violent means. On the assumption of the modified eschatological
character of His teaching, Jesus is still a teacher; that is to say, He
speaks in order to be understood, in order to explain, and has no secrets.
But if His teaching is throughout eschatological, then He is a prophet,
who points in mysterious speech to a coming age, whose words conceal
secrets and offer enigmas, and are not intended to be understood always
and by everybody. Attention was now turned to a number of passages in
which the question arises whether Jesus had any secrets to keep or not.
This question presents itself in connexion with the very earliest of the
parables. In Mark iv. 11, 12 it is distinctly stated that the parables
spoken in the immediate context embody the mystery of the Kingdom of God
in an obscure and unintelligible form, in order that those for whom it is
not intended may hear without understanding. But this is not borne out by
the character of the parables themselves, since _we_ at least find in them
the thought of the constant and victorious development of the Kingdom from
small beginnings to its perfect development. After the passage had had to
suffer many things from constantly renewed attempts to weaken down or
explain away the statement, Jülicher, in his work upon the Parables,(176)
released it from these tortures, left Jesus the parables in their natural
meaning, and put down this unintelligible saying about the purpose of the
parabolic form of discourse to the account of the Evangelist. He would
rather, to use his own expression, remove a little stone from the masonry
of tradition than a diamond from the imperishable crown of honour which
belongs to Jesus. Yes, but, for all that, it is an arbitrary assumption
which damages the Marcan hypothesis more than will be readily admitted.
What was the reason, or what was the mistake which led the earliest
Evangelist to form so repellent a theory regarding the purpose of the
parables? Is the progressive exaggeration of the contrast between veiled
and open speech, to which Jülicher often appeals, sufficient to account
for it? How can the Evangelist have invented such a theory, when he
immediately proceeds to invalidate it by the rationalising, rather
commonplace explanation of the parable of the Sower?
Bernhard Weiss, not being so much under the influence of modern theology
as to feel bound to recognise the paedagogic purpose in Jesus, gives the
text its due, and admits that Jesus intended to use the parabolic form of
discourse as a means of separating receptive from unreceptive hearers. He
does not say, however, what kind of secret, intelligible only to the
predestined, was concealed in these parables which seem clear as daylight.
That was before Johannes Weiss had stated the eschatological question.
Bousset, in his criticism of the eschatological theory,(177) is obliged to
fall back upon Jülicher’s method in order to justify the rationalising
modern way of explaining these parables as pointing to a Kingdom of God
actually present. It is true Jülicher’s explanation of the way in which
the theory arose does not satisfy him; he prefers to assume that the basis
of this false theory of Mark’s is to be found in the fact that the
parables concerning the presence of the Kingdom remained unintelligible to
the contemporaries of Jesus. But we may fairly ask that he should point
out the connecting link between that failure to understand and the
invention of a saying like this, which implies so very much more!
If there are no better grounds than that for calling in question Mark’s
theory of the parables, then the parables of Mark iv., the only ones from
which it is possible to extract the admission of a present Kingdom of God,
remain what they were before, namely, mysteries.
The second volume of Jülicher’s “Parables”(178) found the eschatological
question already in possession of the field. And, as a matter of fact,
Jülicher does abandon “the heretofore current method of modernising the
parables,” which finds in one after another of them only its own favourite
conception of the slow and gradual development of the Kingdom of God. The
Kingdom of Heaven is for Jülicher a completely supernatural idea; it is to
be realised without human help and independently of the attitude of men,
by the sole power of God. The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven
are not intended to teach the disciples the necessity and wisdom of a
development occupying a considerable time, but are designed to make clear
and vivid to them the idea that the period of perfecting and fulfilment
will follow with super‐earthly necessity upon that of imperfection.
But in general the new problem plays no very special part in Jülicher’s
exposition. He takes up, it might almost be said, in relation to the
parables, too independent a position as a religious thinker to care to
understand them against the background of a wholly different world‐view,
and does not hesitate to exclude from the authentic discourses of Jesus
whatever does not suit him. This is the fate, for instance, of the parable
of the wicked husbandmen in Mark xii. He finds in it traits which read
like _vaticinia ex eventu_, and sees therefore in the whole thing only a
prophetically expressed “view of the history as it presented itself to an
average man who had been present at the crucifixion of Jesus and
nevertheless believed in Him as the Son of God.”
But this absolute method of explanation, independent of any traditional
order of time or events, makes it impossible for the author to draw from
the parables any general system of teaching. He makes no distinction
between the Galilaean mystical parables and the polemical, menacing
Jerusalem parables. For instance, he supposes the parable of the Sower,
which according to Mark was the very first of Jesus’ parabolic discourses,
to have been spoken as the result of a melancholy review of a preceding
period of work, and as expressing the conviction, stamped upon His mind by
the facts, “that it was in accordance with higher laws that the word of
God should have to reckon with defeats as well as victories.” Accordingly
he adopts in the main the explanation which the Evangelist gives in Mark
iv. 13‐20. The parable of the seed growing secretly is turned to account
in favour of the “present” Kingdom of God.
Jülicher has an incomparable power of striking fire out of every one of
the parables, but the flame is of a different colour from that which it
showed when Jesus pronounced the parables before the enchanted multitude.
The problem posed by Johannes Weiss in connexion with the teaching of
Jesus is treated by Jülicher only so far as it has a direct interest for
the creative independence of his own religious thought.
Alongside of the parabolic discourses of Mark iv. we have now to place, as
a newly discovered problem, the discourse at the sending out of the Twelve
in Matt. x. Up to the time of Johannes Weiss it had been possible to rest
content with transplanting the gloomy sayings regarding persecutions to
the last period of Jesus’ life; but now there was the further difficulty
to be met that while so hasty a proclamation of the Kingdom of God is
quite reconcilable with an exclusively eschatological character of the
preaching of the Kingdom, the moment this is at all minimised it becomes
unintelligible, not to mention the fact that in this case nothing can be
made of the saying about the immediate coming of the Son of Man in Matt.
x. 23. As though he felt the stern eye of old Reimarus upon him, Bousset
hastens in a footnote to throw overboard the whole report of the mission
of the Twelve as an “obscure and unintelligible tradition.” Not content
with that, he adds: “Perhaps the whole narrative is merely an expansion of
some direction about missionising given by Jesus to the disciples in view
of a later time.” Before, it was only the discourse which was
unhistorical; now it is the whole account of the mission—at least if we
may assume that here, as is usual with theologians of all times, the
author’s real opinion is expressed in the footnote, and his most cherished
opinion of all introduced with “perhaps.” But how much historical material
will remain to modern theologians in the Gospels if they are forced to
abandon it wholesale from their objection to pure eschatology? If all the
pronouncements of this kind to which the representatives of the Marcan
hypothesis have committed themselves were collected together, they would
make a book which would be much more damaging even than that book of
Wrede’s which dropped a bomb into their midst.
A third problem is offered by the saying in Matt. xi. 12, about “the
violent” who, since the time of John the Baptist, “take the Kingdom of
Heaven by force,” which raises fresh difficulties for the exegetical art.
It is true that if art sufficed, we should not have long to wait for the
solution in this case. We should be asked to content ourselves with one or
other of the artificial solutions with which exegetes have been accustomed
from of old to find a way round this difficulty. Usually the saying is
claimed as supporting the “presence” of the Kingdom. This is the line
taken by Wendt, Wernle, and Arnold Meyer.(179) According to the last named
it means: “From the days of John the Baptist it has been possible to get
possession of the Kingdom of God; yea, the righteous are every day earning
it for their own.” But no explanation has heretofore succeeded in making
it in any degree intelligible how Jesus could date the presence of the
Kingdom from the Baptist, whom in the same breath He places outside of the
Kingdom, or why, in order to express so simple an idea, He uses such
entirely unnatural and inappropriate expressions as “rape” and “wrest to
themselves.”
The full difficulties of the passage are first exhibited by Johannes
Weiss.(180) He restores it to its natural sense, according to which it
means that since that time the Kingdom suffers, or is subjected to,
violence, and in order to be able to understand it literally he has to
take it in a condemnatory sense. Following Alexander Schweizer,(181) he
sums up his interpretation in the following sentence: Jesus describes, and
in the form of the description shows His condemnation of, a violent
Zealotistic Messianic movement which has been in progress since the days
of the Baptist.(182) But this explanation again makes Jesus express a very
simple meaning in a very obscure phrase. And what indication is there that
the sense is condemnatory? Where do we hear anything more about a Zealotic
Messianic movement, of which the Baptist formed the starting‐point? His
preaching certainly offered no incentive to such a movement, and Jesus’
attitude towards the Baptist is elsewhere, even in Jerusalem, entirely one
of approval. Moreover, a condemnatory saying of this kind would not have
been closed with the distinctive formula: “He that hath ears to hear let
him hear” (Matt. xi. 15), which elsewhere, cf. Mark iv. 9, indicates a
mystery.
We must, therefore, accept the conclusion that we really do not understand
the saying, that we “have not ears to hear it,” that we do not know
sufficiently well the essential character of the Kingdom of God, to
understand why Jesus describes the coming of the Kingdom as a doing‐
violence‐to‐it, which has been in progress since the days of the Baptist,
especially as the hearers themselves do not seem to have cared, or been
able, to understand what was the connexion of the coming with the
violence; nor do we know why He expects them to understand how the Baptist
is identical with Elias.
But the problem which became most prominent of all the new problems raised
by eschatology, was the question concerning the Son of Man. It had become
a dogma of theology that Jesus used the term Son of Man to veil His
Messiahship; that is to say, every theologian found in this term whatever
meaning he attached to the Messiahship of Jesus, the human, humble,
ethical, unpolitical, unapocalyptic, or whatever other character was held
to be appropriate to the orthodox “transformed” Messiahship. The Danielic
Son of Man entered into the conception only so far as it could do so
without endangering the other characteristics. Confronted with the
Similitudes of Enoch, theologians fell back upon the expedient of assuming
them to be spurious, or at least worked‐over in a Christian sense in the
Son of Man passages, just as the older history of dogma got rid of the
Ignatian letters, of which it could make nothing, by denying their
genuineness. But once the Jewish eschatology was seriously applied to the
explanation of the Son of Man conception, all was changed. A new dilemma
presented itself; either Jesus used the expression, and used it in a
purely Jewish apocalyptic sense, or He did not use it at all.
Although Baldensperger did not state the dilemma in its full trenchancy,
Hilgenfeld thought it necessary to defend Jesus against the suspicion of
having borrowed His system of thought and His self‐designation from Jewish
Apocalypses.(183) Orello Cone, too, will not admit that the expression Son
of Man has only apocalyptic suggestion in the mouth of Jesus, but will
have it interpreted according to Mark ii. 10 and 28, where His pure
humanity is the idea which is emphasised.(184) Oort holds, more logically,
that Jesus did not use it, but that the disciples took the expression from
“the Gospel” and put it into the mouth of Jesus.(185)
Johannes Weiss formulated the problem clearly, and proposed that, with the
exception of the two passages where Son of Man means man in general, only
those should be recognised in which the significance attached to the term
in Daniel and the Apocalypses is demanded by the context. By so doing he
set theology a problem calculated to keep it occupied for many years. Not
many indeed at first recognised the problem. Charles, however, meets it in
a bold fashion, proposing to regard the Son of Man, in Jesus’ usage of the
title, as a conception in which the Messiah of the Book of Enoch and the
Servant of the Lord in Isaiah are united into one.(186) Most writers,
however, did not free themselves from inconsistencies. They wanted at one
and the same time to make the apocalyptic element dominant in the
expression, and to hold that Jesus could not have taken the conception
over unaltered, but must have transformed it in some way. These
inconsistencies necessarily result from the assumption of Weiss’s
opponents that Jesus intended to designate Himself as Messiah in the
actual present. For since the expression Son of Man has in itself only an
apocalyptic sense referring to the future, they had to invent another
sense applicable to the present, which Jesus might have inserted into it.
In all these learned discussions of the title Son of Man this operation is
assumed to have been performed.
According to Bousset, Jesus created, and embodied in this term, a new form
of the Messianic ideal which united the super‐earthly with the human and
lowly. In any case, he thinks, the term has a meaning applicable in this
present world. Jesus uses it at once to conceal and to suggest His
Messianic dignity. How conscious Bousset, nevertheless, is of the
difficulty is evident from the fact that in discussing the meaning of the
title he remarks that the Messianic significance must have been of
subordinate importance in the estimation of Jesus, and cannot have formed
the basis of His actions, otherwise He would have laid more stress upon it
in His preaching. As if the term Son of Man had not meant for His
contemporaries all He needed to say!
Bousset’s essay on Jewish Apocalyptic,(187) published in 1903, seeks the
solution in a rather different direction, by postponing, namely, to the
very last possible moment the adoption of this self‐designation. “In all
probability Jesus in a few isolated sayings towards the close of His life
hit upon this title Son of Man as a means of expressing, in the face of
the thought of defeat and death, which forced itself upon Him, His
confidence in the abiding victory of His person and His cause.” If this is
so, the emphasis must be principally on the triumphant apocalyptic aspects
of the title.
Even this belated adoption of the title Son of Man is more than Brandt is
willing to admit, and he holds it to be improbable that Jesus used the
expression at all. It would be more natural, he thinks, to suppose that
the Evangelist Mark introduced this self‐designation, as he introduced so
much else, into the Gospel on the ground of the figurative apocalyptic
discourses in the Gospel.
Just when ingenuity appeared to have exhausted itself in attempts to solve
the most difficult of the problems raised by the eschatological school,
the historical discussion suddenly seemed about to be rendered objectless.
Philology entered a _caveat_. In 1896 appeared Lietzmann’s essay upon “The
Son of Man,” which consisted of an investigation of the linguistic basis
of the enigmatic self‐designation.
XVII. QUESTIONS REGARDING THE ARAMAIC LANGUAGE, RABBINIC PARALLELS, AND
BUDDHISTIC INFLUENCE