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YALE UNIVERSITY
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GIFT OF
Douglas Qlgfc Macintosh
DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY |E
DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
1916-1942
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THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE GOSPELS

THE ESCHATOLOGY OF
THE GOSPELS

BY

ERNST VON DOBSCHUTZ, D.D.
PROFESSOR OP NEW TESTAMENT EXEGESIS IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON MCMX

F/a.7

PREFACE
r I ^"HE author owes to the reader some
^ words of explanation, how this book
h
3 has come to its present form.
't It was in 1908 that he was asked to
A read a paper before the Third International
Congress for the History of Religions, held
at Oxford, September, 1908. He laid
several subjects to be treated upon before
• the Committee, and the Committee decided
tj in favour of " The Significance of Early
o
fh Christian Eschatology." This paper was
0 printed in the Transactions of the Congress,
& vol. ii., pp. 312-320, and is here reprinted

o
0
•H O
a

vi PREFACE
as an Introduction by kind permission of
the Clarendon Press.
The four lectures which follow appeared
in the Expositor, February-May, 1910, and
are an expansion of what he had given
only in outlines. They were delivered at
the summer school of theology at Oxford
in 1909. v. D.
Strassburg, 1910.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY
PAGE
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EARLY CHRISTIAN
ESCHATOLOGY . . . . ?

LECTURE I
THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY . .35

LECTURE II
VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE TRANS
MISSION OF THE GOSPEL. THE
ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK OF JESUS-
TRADITION . . .77

viii CONTENTS
LECTURE III PAGE
TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE GENUINE
JESUS-TRADITION . . . .121

LECTURE IV
JESUS. VARIOUS MODES OF UNDER
STANDING (ST. JOHN) . . .161

The Significance of Early Christian
Eschatology

E

INTRODUCTORY
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EARLY
CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY
SCHATOLOGY was not so long
ago the last chapter of dogmatics.
The Biblical scholar was quite satisfied
when he had made all the New Testament
sayings about the last things fit into his
system. Nobody cared what the early
Christians felt and thought in reading
these sayings, and but few people were
personally interested in their contents.
Time went on, and New Testament
exegesis became historical instead of dog
matic. Students learned to ask what the
Eschatology. 3

4 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
New Testament authors meant and felt.
But there was so little appreciation for
eschatological ideas that these were, if not
neglected altogether, softened down and
modernised. It is only within the last thirty years
that the attitude of Biblical theology has
changed. Modern criticism allows a special
interest in everything which is alien to
our own time. Hence, together with angel-
ology and demonology, eschatology to-day
forms the most attractive of New Testa
ment studies. And, as it generally hap
pens, where there was once utter neglect,
the tendency is how towards the opposite
extreme — an over-estimation of the signifi
cance of eschatology on the part of a
considerable number of scholars.
Under these circumstances I may be
justified in laying before this distinguished
assembly this question : What was the real

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 5
significance of eschatology in the earliest
days of Christianity ?
I do not propose to deal here with early
Christian eschatological doctrines in general.
It is well known what a number of apoca
lyptic ideas were current during that period.
We may take it for granted that all these
were borrowed from Judaism, whatever
may have been their origin. The gospel
introduced two new points only: (i) the
central place was given to Jesus, whose
parousia or descent from heaven in the
glory of the Father was to bring with it
the end of this world, the resurrection, the
judgment, the kingdom of God, and life
everlasting ; and (2) this was expected to
happen very speedily, the Messiah having
been sent already by God in the person
of Jesus, and being postponed for a short
space only. This is the vital point : early
Christianity was not simply meditating on

6 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
eschatological dreams that might be
realised some time or other at a remote
period, but the first Christians were per
suaded that the great day when all would
be changed was to come in the lifetime of
their own generation.
No modern scholar will deny, I trust,
that Jesus Himself and His disciples, in
cluding the Apostle Paul, shared this per
suasion. Of course, it cannot be proved that
Jesus ever thought that He would succeed
in establishing the kingdom of God with
out dying first. It is a widespread hypo
thesis among scholars of our time that
He did so, at least in the first period of
His ministry ; that He tried to win His
people by preaching and healing, and that
He was only led by the experience of
growing hatred on the part of His country
men to reckon, first with the possibility,
then with the necessity, of His death, and,

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 7
finally, to attribute to it a positive efficacy.
In vain we ask for proofs of this theory.
Jesus says that unto this (present) genera
tion no sign should be given,1 that there
were some of them that stood there who
should not taste of death till they had
seen the kingdom of God come with
power.2 He never speaks of His own life
time 3 ; it is only in the next generation
that the kingdom will come. His disciples
have to wait for it, as they pray for its
coming.4 And thus the apostles, when Jesus was
taken from them, taught the people that
Jesus of Nazareth, whom the chiefs of the
Jews put to death, was the man ordained
1 Mark viii. 12. 2 Mark ix. g.
3 Matt x. 23 is to be understood of the mission
ary work after Jesus's death, not of the disciples'
short trip through Galilee.
4 Matt. vi. 10.

8 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
by God; but they did not tell them that
the new era had already begun. The
kingdom was still to be expected. Jesus
must come back from heaven to establish
it, and would come quickly.
St. Paul felt sure that he would be still
alive at the coming. " We which are
alive and remain," he says to the Thessa-
lonians J ; and in his first letter to the
Corinthians he expresses the same view.2
Later on his attitude changes. As a
matter of fact, in the second to the Corin
thians, his position has become uncertain ;
still he hopes and wishes that death may
not come to him before Christ's parousia ;
but having realised that death can come
suddenly, even upon him, he declares
solemnly his confidence that he will be in
communion with Christ even in death :
1 i Thess. iv. 15, 17. * 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 9
"We are confident, I say, and willing
rather to be absent from the body and to
be present with the Lord." l Here we find
for the first time the individual death
taking the place of the parousia, an alter
native often suggested by later Christian
writers. But Paul does not at all mean
to set aside the enthusiastic expectation
of Christ's immediate advent. His only
doubt is this : will he himself be still alive ?
The event is not postponed ; on the con
trary, it draws nigh rapidly, as he writes
to the Romans : "Now is our salvation
nearer than when we believed." 2 And even
in the last of his letters he declares : " We
look for the salvation from heaven." 3
To these testimonies we may add the
opening and the closing words of St.
John's Revelation : " Things which must
1 2 Cor. v- 6-8. 2 Rom. xiii. 11-12.
3 Phil, iii, 20.

10 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
shortly come to pass ; " " For the time is
at hand ; " " Surely I come quickly. Amen.
Even so, Lord Jesus".1 It is impossible
not to see how deeply early Christianity
was impressed with this conviction.
Not a single modern scholar, I feel sure,
will deny these statements. The question,
however, is how far this belief in an
immediate coming of the end acted upon
the mind of Jesus and of His disciples.
We shall find that it did not do so as
much as we might expect.
Jesus declares that the gospel must be
preached to all nations before the kingdom
can come ; 2 but He does not go beyond
the Jewish frontiers. 3 Although at the
sending out of His disciples to preach in
the cities and villages of Palestine His
1 Rev. i. i, 3 ; xxii. 20.
2 Mark xiii. 10. 3 Mark vi. 1 ff.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 11
orders show that He would have them
hurry on,1 He Himself makes no haste at
all. There is no evidence that He ever
dreamt of hastening on the day of the
Lord by His activity or His suffering, that
(to quote from a recent author) He was
possessed with the idea that His inter
vention would bring to a standstill the
wheel of history.
And even St. Paul, much as he was
impressed by the urgent need of accom
plishing his missionary work throughout
the world before the coming of Christ,2
did not hurry on from town to town ; on
the contrary, he was anxious to stay as
long as his activity was needed, not merely
to found, but to develop and to educate a
Christian community.
Now, as a matter of fact, in his exhor-
1 Mark vi. 8-12. 2 Rom. xv. 16.

12 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
tation he frequently insists on the approach
of judgment and final salvation.1 When
he appeals to scriptural " examples " he
justifies himself by the remark that the end
of the time has come upon his readers.2
But we cannot say that this view materially
influenced his ethics. Many scholars
maintain that we have to explain from
the eschatological point of view what Paul
says about marriage in i Cor. vii., and,
indeed, his general idea is that, as the
time is short, nothing should be changed;
he who was married when he became a
Christian should remain married ; he who
was unmarried should so remain : "let every
man abide in the same calling wherein
he was called." 3 His preference for celibacy,
however, is not to be explained by his
1 i Thess. v. i ff. ; Rom. xii. 1 1.
2 i Cor. x. ii.
3 i Cor. vii. 17, 20, 24.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 13
eschatology r ; it was the asceticism of his
age which influenced him in regarding
marriage as the lower state.
Jesus certainly looks forward to a rich
harvest, which is to be given to the poor,
the hungry, the merciful, the pure in
heart,2 and so on, when the kingdom
comes ; and this will be very soon. He
insists on the duty of being watchful,
because the day will come suddenly as
a thief in the night.3 But if we eliminate
His eschatological ideas His ethics remain
unchanged. Take, for example, the parables
of the Good Samaritan and of the Prodigal
Son.4 The great commandments of love
1 i Cor. vii. 26, 31, have been partly mis
interpreted, partly overvalued in their signi
ficance. 2 Matt. v. 3-12 ; Luke vi. 20-22.
3 Matt. xxiv. 42-44.
4 Luke x. 30 ff. ; xv. 1 1 ff.

14 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
and of self-renunciation l are in no way
suggestive of an " interim ethics," but of
a definite, absolute system of ethics.
And in this way His ethical precepts
were understood, taught, and acted upon
by the early Christians.2 That they are
strange to our modern Christian mind is
not due to the fact that we have aban
doned the eschatological idea, but to the
fact that the enthusiasm which inspired
them and made their fulfilment easy is no
longer ours. This enthusiasm, however,
has its roots not so much in eschatology
as in the profound consciousness of a
change already accomplished through the
experience of salvation, as we shall see
hereafter. It is true that neither Jesus nor Paul
i Mark xii. 28-34 ; Matt. v. 38-48 ; Luke vi.
26, 27.
* E.g., 1 Thess. v. 15 ; Rom. xii. 17-21.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 15
conceived the idea of a gradual develop
ment of the kingdom, or of an extension
of the Church through a long period of
history upon earth. Jesus's first coming
was not indeed the end, but at the end
of history. It is from this point of view
that we have to understand what Jesus
Himself says about His death, as a
ransom for many and the making of a
new covenant.1 He looks backward in
history. The new covenant will be in
another Kon, not on this earth, not under
these conditions of life.2 When St. Paul
speaks of Jesus as a propitiation, and of
the redemption and forgiveness of all sins
by His death,3 this is intelligible on the
supposition that what stands at the end
of history extends its influence backwards
1 Mark x. 45 ; xiv. 24.
2 Mark xii. 25 ; xiv. 25. 3 Rom. iii. 25.

16 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
upon the whole period which preceded.
Paul does not think about the sins of
millions of men, who will live after Christ's
death. When he insists on the parallelism
between Adam and Christ,1 he is thinking
of humanity in its beginning and in its
end. Christ is not the centre or turning-
point of a great historical development, as
we may now call Him from our remote
standpoint, but He is the end itself. What
follows is no continuation, but a renovation
of what has gone before, a new humanity
in a new world.
Thus the general conception of history
in primitive Christianity so characteristic
of Jewish thought as contrasted with
Greek philosophy is strongly influenced by
what we may call the eschatological idea.
And it is this historical conception which
1 Rom. v. 12-21.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 17
throws light upon the early Christian
theories of redemption.
These theories, however, are but a form
of religious thought, just as ethics are
only a way of forming the moral power of
Christendom. When we ask what is the
kernel of early Christian religious feeling,
we shall find that there is nothing eschato
logical about it.
Jesus's religious position may be rightly
defined as a life of unbroken union with
God. The Judaism of His time, even in
its most pious form, thought of God as
of a distant Being, removed and com
pletely separated from this world of sin,
which was given into the dominion of
subordinate or even evil spirits until the
time when God should come to judge the
world and to establish His own sove
reignty. Jesus knows Him — and teaches
men to know Him — as the Father, who,
Eschatology. O

18 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
always and everywhere present, cares about
the welfare of all His children ; J who has
compassion on the sinner and forgives
trespasses whenever man repents. It is
in the strength of this trust that Jesus
goes on His way, undisturbed by hostile
threats ; 2 that He sleeps in the storm, 3
feeds the multitude, 4 heals all kinds of
sickness, 5 and casts out the demons.6
Thence He gets a conception of the
fiao-t\da tov Qsov quite different from the
current one ; the kingdom of God is not
to be brought about by a miraculous
act of God, but it is the domination of
God casting away all evil powers. 7 Jesus
1 Matt. v. 45 ; Luke vi. 35.
2 Luke xiii. 31, 32. 3 Mark iv. 37-40.
4 Mark vi. 34-40; viii. 13-26.
s Mark i. 32 ff. ; ii. 5 ; v. 34 ; xi. 23, 24. '
6 Mark iii. 22 ff.
7 Matt. xii. 28 ; Luke xi. 20. Cp. Luke x. 18.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 19
Himself by His complete union with God
brings in this domination of God : it is
where He is ; it is present among men ;
it is to be found in men's hearts, and not
to be looked for in external miraculous
signs.1 So Jesus — in His own opinion —
is not only preparing the future kingdom
of God, like His forerunner, John the
Baptist, but He is actually bringing it in.2
He is the bridegroom whose companions
cannot fast while He is with them. 3
From the parables of the garment and of
the wine-bottles 4 we learn that He looks
on Himself and His surroundings as some
thing quite new. He does not speak
much of the new spirit, but all His acting
is dominated by a new spirit. So is that
1 Luke xvii. 21.
2 Matt. xi. 9-10 ; Luke vii. 26-8 ; xvi. 16.
3 Mark ii. 19.
4 Mark ii. 21, 22 ; Matt. xiii. 16, 17.

20 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
of His disciples. Of course, in His
addresses to the people He speaks as the
missionary ; there is the need to be watch
ful, for the great moment will come
shortly, suddenly. But in the intimate
circle of His followers there is no anxious
self-preparation for judgment to come, but
a happy enjoyment of all blessings which
God's grace had vouchsafed to them in
Jesus. This is the meaning of Peter's
confession : l " People may say, Thou art
a prophet, one of a large number, an
Elijah or John, i.e., the forerunner of a
greater one. We confess that Thou art
the Christ, the unique bringer of salva
tion : there is none greater than Thou ;
in Thee we enjoy our union with God,
in short our salvation."
It is this spirit of gladness, caused by
1 Mark viii. 28, 29.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 21
the experience of the greatest gifts of
God, that we discern in the disciples
after Jesus had gone from them. Whether
it be called the experience of communion
with the risen Lord or the communion of
the Holy Ghost, it is not the anticipation
of something yet to come ; it is the actual
possession of a present benefit.
This fact becomes still more patent when
we turn once more to St. Paul. What
has the triumphant hymn in Rom. viii.
to do with eschatology ? The Christian is
sure of God's love as shown and guaran
teed to him by Christ who came down
and died for this very purpose, and by
the Holy Ghost, which is given into his
heart.1 Salvation is at hand, God has
performed, Christ has died and risen, the
Holy Ghost has been given to every
1 Rom. v. 5-8 ; viii. 32.

22 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
believer. Christians, then, are washed,
sanctified, justified.1 They are living in
a new state ; " old things are passed away ;
behold, all things are become new."2
Eschatology, it is true, is at the back
ground of all this, but it has changed its
significance. Many sayings of Jesus and
Paul are then only fully intelligible if we
recognise that eschatological terms are
used by them in a new sense ; they dis
card all external, political, miraculous sig
nificance, but take the inward moral meaning
as already fulfilled. 3 At the same time
they do not entirely eliminate the other
meaning ; putting forward the new, they
retain the original one combined with it.
If time present had brought fulfilment,
still larger fulfilment is in store for time
to come.
1 i Cor. vi. n ; i. 30. 2 2 Cor. v. 17.
3 See, e.g., 1 Cor. iv. 8.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 23
Jesus, like all great religious personali
ties, was at once progressive and emi
nently conservative. The new gifts which
He had to bring to mankind are envisaged
by Himself in the form of old Jewish
conceptions. External reality did not
correspond to what people expected, to
what Jesus Himself found in the prophets.
There was still a lack of external glory.
Now Jesus trusted to His Father that He
would accomplish what He had begun,
and fulfil all that He had promised. And
so eschatology in its old form was for Him
a postulate of His faith. The kingdom is
at hand, it is present in His person, in
His casting out devils, in His bringing
sinners to repentance — but it has still to
come in glory, when after His death and
resurrection He will come upon the clouds
from heaven.1 Men are God's beloved
1 Mark viii. 38 ; xiv. 62.

24 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
and happy children; so runs His message,
and they are this if they are merciful even
as He is.1 But He can also say, "Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they shall be
called the children of God."2 So in Jesus's
preaching everything is at once present and
future : you have it, you will receive it.
The same may be said of St. Paul's
doctrine : there we find not only the
double conception of the kingdom, present
and future, 3 but also that of sonship, of
redemption, of deliverance, of righteousness,
and so on. We are children of God ; we
have the spirit of sonship, and yet we
have to wait for the manifestation of the
sons of God ; we wait for the sonship.4
We are redeemed, and yet we look for
1 Matt. v. 45 ; Luke vi. 35. 2 Matt. v. 9.
3 Rom. xiv. 17 ; 1 Cor. iv. 20 ; 1 Thess. ii. 12 ;
1 Cor. vi. 9, 10 ; Gal. v. 21.
4 Rom. viii. 14, 16, 19, 23.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 25
the redemption of our body.1 Paul feels
himself a new creature, exalted above all
human misery and sin : and yet all that
he now has, is but a small portion of what
he will obtain when his Lord comes in
His glory to glorify those who belong to
Him.2 If Christ's death has done such
great things, he argues in Romans v., to
reconcile us with God how great will be
the effect of Christ's life, 3 i.e., of His
coming in glory and of our being united
with Him eternally.
We are now in a better position to
understand how it is that Paul, when
changing his opinion as to the time of his
own death in relation to the parousia, did
not forthwith set aside the old conception
(as we should have expected, had he been
merely abandoning Rabbinical views for
1 I Cor. i. 30 ; Rom. viii. 23.
* 2 Cor. v. 17. 3 Rom. v. 9, 10.

26 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
Hellenistic ones). Even in the latest of
his letters he holds both conceptions: on
the one hand he can desire to depart and
to be with Christ ; on the other he can
anticipate Christ's return from heaven to
conform the body of our humiliation to
the body of His glory.1
It would be easy to demonstrate these
alternating views by the Rabbinical doctrine
of the two Olams (eeons, worlds), the one
present, bad, evil, and the other future,
glorious, happy. The New Testament
writers use the terms, but it is difficult to
say how precisely they view their own
age. If Christ came that He might de
liver us from the present evil world,
Christians belong already to the new world.
And yet all the external conditions of the
old bad world still exist. Christians dwell
still in the flesh, but they walk not after
1 Phil. i. 20; iii. 20, 21.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 27
the flesh ; or, as St. John says, they are
in the world but not of the world. It is
remarkable that we nowhere find an ex
plicit theory of an intermediate state like
later doctrines of the twofold advent of
Christ, or the later distinction between
ecclesia militans and ecclesia triumphans.
The early Christians were so enthusiastic
in their belief in an accomplished salva
tion that, in spite of all external evidence,
they imagined themselves already dwelling
in the new order of things. If St. Mark
illustrates the effect of Christ's death by
the veil of the temple rent in twain from
the top to the bottom, the Gospel accord
ing to St. Matthew anticipate the signs
of the parousia and the last judgment
by the earthquake, the opening of the
graves, and the rise of the many bodies
of the saints.1
1 Mark xv. 38 ; Matt, xxvii. 51, 52.

28 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
This attitude of early Christianity is to
be seen in its clearest form in the Johan
nine writings. It is well known that the
fourth evangelist (whoever he may be)
uses eschatological terms in the modified
sense : £wrj alwviog, " eternal life," is not, as in
other books, the life of the seon to come,
but it is something that begins in this life,
— life in the highest sense — whereas what
men call life is but death. So Christ gives
life everlasting to all who know Him and
believe in Him. So, too, judgment and
resurrection are taken in a figurative sense :
for the Christian judgment lies in the
past ; he has passed from death into life ; l
the Kpimg is effected by the separation of
believers and unbelievers.2 It is to be
understood in this figurative sense when
Jesus says : " The hour is coming, and now
1 Johnv. 24. 2 John iii. 17-21.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 29
is, when the dead shall hear the voice of
the Son of God, and they that hear shall
live " : men, morally dead, by accepting
the gospel get life everlasting.1 But when,
three verses further on, he says, " For
the hour is coming, in the which all that
are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and
shall come forth ; they that have done
good, unto the resurrection of life, and
they that have done evil, unto the resur
rection of judgment" (damnation),2 the
thought is fully eschatological. It is this
combination of non-eschatological plus
eschatological ideas which makes the
Johannine characteristic as distinct both
from primitive Christian and from Gnostic
views. And yet it is the very attitude
of Jesus and Paul which we recognise in
this Johannine two-sidedness.
1 John v. 25. 2 John v. 28, 29.

30 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
At this point we may stop. We have
found eschatology playing a great part in
early Christian belief and thought, (i) as
a strong motive in moral exhortation — but
only one motive besides others, such as
thankfulness for God's grace, care for
God's honour, Christian self-respect, and
so on — and not influencing Christian
ethics materially ; (2) as the key to the
historical conception of God's working
with mankind, the sending of His Son as
Saviour being the end of a long history
of sin. But it was not of the essence of
Christian faith, this being rather confidence
in a present activity of God and an already
accomplished salvation.
We may accordingly affirm that Chris
tianity did not change its essence, when
the expectation of Christ's coming became
fainter and eschatology fell into the rank
of a doctrine of merely historical value.

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 31
The remark may be added that the great
eschatological pictures come in only at a
later period of early Christian literature,
not in the first, but in the second genera
tion. That the mass of Jewish apocalyptic
ideas is introduced, is in itself evidence of
the weakening of early Christian confi
dence. And at the same time we may deter
mine the position of the Gospel in
the history of religions. All religions of
that time were religions of hope. Stress
was laid on the future ; the present time
was but for preparation. So in the mys
terious cults of Hellenism, whose highest
aim is to offer guarantees for other worldly
happiness ; so too in Judaism, whose legacy
has but the aim of furnishing the happy
life in the kingdom of the future. Christi
anity is a religion of faith, the gospel
giving not only guarantees for the future

32 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
life in another world, but bringing by itself
confidence, peace, joy, salvation, forgive
ness, righteousness — whatever man's heart
yearns after.
With this it combines hope — this we
must never forget. Hope is an essential
feature of vivid religious feeling. But in
primitive Christian piety hope takes only
the second place. When at a later period,
hope takes the first rank at the expense
of faith, as may be seen, e.g., in i Peter
and Hebrews, this is due to the increasing
influence of pre-Christian Hellenistic re
ligion, and means a declension. Strange
to say, the weakening of eschatological
feeling and the other-worldly tendency are
both produced by the same movement.
Now, where all stress is laid on hope,
instead of on trust, joy changes into timidity,
the religious stimulus once more becomes
fear. So we see the Christianity of the

EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY 33
second century creating a new system of
guarantees, exactly similar to that which
the mysteries of Greece had furnished :
guarantees of a future salvation — a highly
uncertain salvation. But wherever there
is a revival of the Gospel, e.g., in St.
Augustine, St. Francis, Luther, and the
other heroes of the Reformation, we meet
again joyful confidence and assurance of
salvation combined with a secure hope
of still greater blessings.
This is the proof from history for our
thesis.

Eschatology.

The Problem and its History

LECTURE I
THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
T^SCHATOLOGY is at the present
¦*~^ moment a favourite subject which
attracts more and more the interest of
large circles. I hope, therefore, that the fol
lowing four lectures, which were delivered at
the Summer School of Theology at Oxford,
September 1909, may be welcomed here.
I give them, with the exception of some
slight alterations, in the original form of
lectures. The subject, as it was formulated by
the Committee of the Summer School,
is not equivalent to "The eschatology of
37

38 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
Jesus " — it includes much more ; nor is it so
comprehensive as the paper read before the
third International Congress for the history
of religions, at Oxford, September 1908, on
"The Significance of early Christian eschato
logy,"1 As it is given, the subject places us
before the whole gospel-question, reminding
us of two most important points which we
never should lose sight of in studying the
Gospels, two points indeed which make the
problem so intricate and difficult : first that
all depends on " the Gospel," i.e. on what
Jesus Himself thought and said ; and
secondly, that we have this only in the
form of " the Gospels," i.e. in the different
forms of tradition. Or, to use Matthew
Arnold's words : " All our criticism of the
four Evangelists who report Jesus has this
for its governing idea : to make out what
1 See above, p. 1-33.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 39
in their report of Jesus is Jesus, and what is
the reporters." * I
Before we attack the problem itself, it
will be desirable to say a few words with
regard to its history. This, I think, is
what a methodical study needs most. It
makes the distinction between the reading
of a scholar and a dilettante. The latter,
when he comes across any question, will at
once go into it or through it with his own
brains only, and perhaps one or two books
with which chance has provided him ; while
on the other side the scholar will, before
starting, find out what the question really
is : what has to be said about it when it is
taken in connection with all related prob
lems, and what has been said already by
1 God and the Bible, 1875, ^7-

40 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
those into whose labours he is entering.
Having thus fixed as a well-trained ex
plorer the latitude and the longitude of his
own position, he may say confidently :
There we are, and it is in this direction
that we have to go on further.
i. Now the question laid before us is, we
may safely say, as so many other questions,
at the same time quite old and quite recent.
It is quite old, because there was no time
in Church history when Christians were
not occupied by the eschatological sayings
in the Bible. It is quite recent, because
it was only in the last century that the
question became a problem in the sense
of modern historical investigation. I think
it is always very useful, especially for men
of our own time, who are so proud of the
results of modern research, to be reminded
that those problems have been felt ever
since the first age, that the same observa-

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 41
tions have always been made, and that it
is only the method of dealing with them,
the way by which we try to solve them,
which changes. It has been observed from
the very beginning that in the holy Scrip
tures there is plenty of information about
the last things, the end of the world and the
glorious and happy state of a new age,
about judgment and final salvation. It has
been felt always with keen regret that in
formation on these subjects is so scanty, so
fragmentary, so very uncertain. Now the
old method was to gather all utterances
scattered through the whole book and to
combine them so as to gain a systematic,
self-consistent view. Biblical interpretation,
as you know, from the first century down
to the eighteenth was dominated by dog
matic and practical presuppositions. People
did not ask what Jesus said nor what the
apostles meant, but what God had to tell

42 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
them by the mouth of His prophets and
apostles. In this way they dealt with the
eschatological utterances as with a collec
tion of divine oracles which were to be
fulfilled in their present time, and thus
were to be explained by the events which
just then were going on. You may read
Hippolytus' commentary on the Book of
Daniel, or his treatise on the Antichrist,
or the fifteenth catechesis of Bishop Cyril
of Jerusalem, or whatever patristic com
mentary of non-Alexandrian type you like :
you will find them always explaining New
Testament prophecies as coming to fulfil
ment in the interpreter's own time. What
was said about " battles and wars, famines
and pestilences, and earthquakes " was
always easy to be identified with some
events of the time. There were always
some heretics able to be stamped as the
Antichrist or his prophet. Wyclifites,

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 43
Hussites, the Reformers recognised the
Antichrist sitting in the temple of God
in the Pope, whilst, on the other hand,
the Jesuits easily found marks of the Anti
christ in Luther or Calvin. Later on there
was Napoleon as the beast from the abyss,
or the railway as the dragon with his tail —
in our time it would be the motor-cars. At
all events it was always something of the
interpreter's own time. You had only to
open your eyes and to look around you to
see that the time was fulfilled and the end
at hand.
This form of interpretation, which we
may call the historical adaptation of escha
tological prophecy, was the most widely
spread. Former times had only two alter
natives besides, viz., the spiritualising in
terpretation of the Alexandrian school,
which rather tended to abolish all eschato
logical ideas, and another one, which one

44 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
may speak of as a really eschatological
interpretation ; there were only a few
exceptional men who, disregarding the
usual view, maintained that the predictions
of those marvellous supernatural events
which are spoken of in the New Testament
were to be taken in a very strict sense,
so that it would be impossible to identify
them with anything in the ordinary course
of history. You have, they declared, to
expect them as they are foretold, but we
do not know at what time they will happen ;
it may be in some few years, it may be in
some hundred years, because, as has been
said already in the second Epistle of St.
Peter, "A thousand years are with the
Lord as one day."
It is very interesting to see on this point
St. Augustine's correspondence with the
Bishop of Salona, Hesychius.1 To speak
1 Epp. 197, 198, 199 in Migne, PL 33, 899-925.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 45
in general terms, this view, supported first
by Irenaeus, found a stronger support only
in more recent times. It was the so-called
first Tubingen school — not that critical one
of F. Chr. Baur, but an earlier one, founded
by Storr and represented in Baur's own
time by J. T. Beck. Quite evangelical in
type, these theologians put themselves
against all spiritualising as much as Bishop
Nepos or Methodius in the third century
had contradicted the spiritualising inter
pretation of Origen. We may remark that
there had been always a realistic tradition
in western interpretation. So Bengel and
the Tubingen men laid much stress on the
realistic meaning of New Testament escha
tology, but they neglected altogether that
element of nearness in the prophecies which,
taken strictly, would never allow a hundred
or thousand years to be put between predic
tion and fulfilment.

46 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
2. With the eighteenth century inter
pretation became historical, and thus only
the question arose : what was the meaning
of the men who uttered those predictions ?
Certainly they did not think about events
of the second or fourth, or even the nine
teenth century. By saying "what will
shortly come to pass " they did not mean
to say "shortly" for Hippolytus or for
Cyril, nor even for Swedenborg, but
" shortly " for themselves. They must
have been thinking of the last things as
being at hand. But how did they con
ceive them ? Was it really to be under
stood verbally, exactly as the words used
suggest, something almost supernatural, but
at the same time visible, and to be touched,
— some divine miraculous change of the
whole external order of things, — or was
it rather to be understood in a spiritual
sense of something moral and inward ?

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 47
There were at first only very few voices
who supported the former view, which
hardly could be brought into line with
modern ideas. The majority of inter
preters tried to escape from the difficulty
by returning to the allegorising method of
Origen. We quite understand that the
average of modern theology, influenced as
it was by Greek philosophy on one side,
and by the predominant ethical ideas of
the gospel on the other, could not do
otherwise than spiritualise what was said
by Christ and His apostles. It was in
particular Schleiermacher's school, but also
the critical school of Baur, which renewed
the old spiritualising allegory. The whole
school of Vermittelungs-theologen, as we
usually call them, as well as the liberals of
former times, acknowledged nothing but
religious and moral ideas in the teaching
of Jesus. The eschatological utterances,

48 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
interpreted in this way, lost all their
significance and became rather a duplicate
of other sayings put into an awkward
picturesque form : so — it was argued — we
had better neglect them and keep to the
clearer utterances of the Fourth Gospel.
You may take the Biblical theology of the
late Professor Willibald Beyschlag, of
Halle, as the average expression of this
standpoint in Germany. We find it sup
ported even at the present day by, for
instance, the late Professor Erich Haupt,
of Halle,1 and by Professor Adams Brown,
of New York.2
But this spiritualising interpretation does
too much violence to the actual words of
the Gospel. It could not stand the attack

1 Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in
synoptischen Evangelien, 1895.
2 Art. Parousia in Hastings DB, iii. 674-680,
1900.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY -^49
of a more realistic feeling in New Testa
ment theology. Professor B. Weiss, of
Berlin, simply by collecting all that is to
be found in the Gospels, demonstrated
clearly that there are many really eschato
logical ideas. I should mention here a
very important English contribution, pub
lished for the first time without the author's
name in 1878 with the title, The Parousia,
a critical inquiry into the New Testament
Doctrine of our Lords Second Coming ; in
a new edition of 1887 the author's name
was added — J. S. Russell. I do not know
who he was, but at all events he was a
very sincere Bible-reader. He made it
quite clear that you cannot deal with the
New Testament prophecies in the way
of former interpreters, taking them as
referring to a much later time, nor put
them aside by reading something spiritual
into them ; you have to take them as they
Eschatology. 5

50J THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
are : foretelling some great catastrophe in
the lifetime of Jesus' own generation.
When he comes to the end of his inves
tigation, he puts the difficulty in the form
of the following dilemma : either you have
to say with some rationalists, Jesus and
His apostles were wrong in their expecta
tion ; or if you believe in the divine truth of
the Bible, you must explain it by some event
of the apostolic time, and you will easily find
this in the destruction of Jerusalem.
Now, as a matter of fact, this solution
of the question is a very old one. It has
its Biblical support in the writings of St.
Luke, who, as we shall see in our next
lecture, colours the eschatological utterances
in such a way that they may be under
stood of the destruction of Jerusalem. It
has always had some support by later
interpretation.1 But it will not prove
1 This historical orientation of Jesus' predic-

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 1.1

itself to be the final solution of the
problem. 3. By modern research we have become
acquainted with much apocalyptic literature,
produced by later Judaism and highly
appreciated in the early Christian Church,
but forgotten for many centuries. We owe
their discovery and collection to such
scholars as Dillmann, Volkmar, Hilgenfeld,
Schiirer, and to English scholars, in the
first rank of whom I should mention Pro
fessor R. H. Charles, besides Dr. Taylor,
the late Master of St. John's, Cambridge,
tions is the main feature in the most recent
contribution to our subject by H. B. Sharman,
The Teaching of Jesus about the future according
to the Synoptic Gospels, Chicago, 1909. Cp. also
Canon Grierson's pamphlet on Christ s Predictions
of His Return in The Churchman, Dec, 1908, who
maintains that Christ was conscious of His cosmic
relations and foreknew His manifold comings in
the epoch-making crisis of history.

^|)THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
Rendel Harris and F. C. Conybeare. By
reading this apocalyptic literature we be
came aware of a very important feature,
not noted before, viz., that the eschato
logical ideas, or, as I would rather say,
the forms in which they were uttered, were
by no means an original product of the
Gospel, but are taken over from later
Judaism. This means that we have to
explain them by an eschatological tradition.
There was a certain amount of eschato
logical views spread in Judaism, being a
part of what we call the " Weltanschauung,"
the general view of the world, prevailing
at that time. And even Jesus and His
disciples were participators of it ; their
horizon was not wider in this respect than
that of their countrymen.
So a quite new form of interpretation
appeared, the utterances of the Gospels
being explained by Jewish eschatology. It

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY f53

was Joh. Weiss, in his book, Die Predigt
Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 1892, second
edition, 1900, who started this new form
with a rare success.1 The current notions
of the gospel were all to be taken in the
realistic sense of late Judaism ; the escha
tological prophecies of Jesus were to be
understood from his Jewish conceptions,
without any regard to their fulfilment.
There is a strong tendency now among
German interpreters to get rid of their
own modern views with the aim of looking
at the early Christian writings with early
Christian eyes, a tendency which you would
call perhaps Romanticism, but is, how
ever, better styled historical sincerity com-
1 The influence of J. Weiss may best be seen
in the second edition of H. Wendt, Die Lehre Jesu,
1901, where we have the most deliberate and
circumspect judgment pronounced upon this
eschatological view.

(5p THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
bined with some antiquarian feeling. They
enlarge intentionally the difference between
early and recent Christian views as much
as possible with the purpose of being
historical as far as possible.' The best
example of this one-sided archaism may
be found in Kabisch's book on Pauline
eschatology (1893). But there are many
other contributions of the same style in
Germany now. In this way we got used
to these rather strange eschatological ideas,
so that many of our recent German students
will find themselves quite at home in them
and will think this form of interpretation
to be the usual, the only natural one.
4. This is not all. Quite recently the
problem of eschatology has gained yet
another aspect. We have learned not only
1 Cp. the present writer's paper : Der gegen-
wdrtige Stand der Neutestamentlichen Exegese,
1906.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY (5p
to deal with the notions of Jesus and His
disciples, and to explain them by contem
porary views, but to^fsk for the practical
significance of these views for those who
held them. It is one of the great merits
of Professor H. J. Holtzmann, formerly
of Strassburg,1 that he showed how to
combine both these modes of dealing with
the question, not only to collect and ex
plain the single utterances, but to make
out their importance as influencing Jesus'
whole life. There has been always some
tendency in this direction in Strassburg
theology. It was Tim. Colani 2 who first
1 Besides his Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen
Theologie, 1897, I would recommend in connexion
with our question especially his masterful little
treatise, Das Messianische Bewusstsein Jesu, 1907,
which gives an accurate summary of the present
stand, together with a complete record of recent
contributions. 2 Jesus Christ et les croyances messianiques de
son temps, 1869.

@ THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
threw light upon the life of Jesus from
the point of view of eschatology. From
Strassburg started W. Baldensperger, now
Professor at Giessen.' Professor F- Spitta,
of Strassburg, has the great merit of
always getting fresh lights upon the story
of the Gospels out of those late Jewish
apocryphas, going hand in hand with Joh.
Weiss in their realistic interpretation. So
you will easily understand how it came
to pass that one of the most clever junior
Strassburg men, Dr. Albert Schweitzer,
also well known as an ingenious interpreter
i of Bach's music, happened to put forth
Ihis so-called theory of "consequent escha-
ltology," i.e. that Jesus in all His acting
us to be understood by nothing else than
[His eschatological view that He was
1 Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der
messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit, 1 888 ;
second edition 1892, third edition 1903 (part I.).

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 57
designed by the Father to bring an end
unto all things. Now I wonder how it
happened that this theory, put forth in
the form of a history, or rather an historical
review, of the research on the life of Christ
in the last hundred years " from Reimarus
to Wrede," 1906, met with much more
appreciation in England than in Germany,
where even Schweitzer's friends were rather
surprised by the one-sidedness of his views
and declined to follow him. I need refer
only to the criticism made upon the
book by Professor P. Wernle (Basle),1 by
Professor Ad. Jiilicher (Marburg),2 and
last, not least, Professor H. J. Holtzmann 3
1 In Theol. Literaturzeitung, 1906, N. 18, Sp.
501 ff.
2 In his lectures Neue Linien in der Kritik der
evangelischen Uberlieferung, 1906, 1-13.
3 In his reviews Der gegenwartige Stand der
Leben-Jesu-Forschung, Deutsche Literaturzeitung,
1906, N. 38 ff.

(185 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
— while Professor W. Sanday's treatment
of the book in his work, The Life of
Christ in Recent Research, 1907, gave
Dr. Schweitzer's book a splendid advertise
ment in this country and, at the Oxford
Congress for the history of religions in
1908, Professor F. C. Burkitt' made
himself champion of this theory of con
sistent eschatology, which I myself would
prefer to call radical eschatology.
Now, without going into the question
itself, which will be our task in the next
lectures, I may be allowed to say only
this : if eschatology is the key to all gospel-
1 See his paper on The Parable of the Wicked
Husbandmen, Transactions, II. 321-328, and cp.
also his essay The Eschatological Idea in the
Gospel in Essays on some Biblical Questions of
the day, by Members of the University of
Cambridge, 1909, 193-213. Unnecessary to say,
that Prof. Burkitt does not share all the conclusions
of Dr. Schweitzer !

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY (59

questions, then it becomes the problem of
problems how Christianity could go on
without eschatology through so many cen
turies. If there was nothing in Jesus but
eschatology, then He was a misguided
enthusiast, and it would be almost im
possible to explain how the name of an
eccentric became the symbol for millions
and millions of Christians who took from
Him not only some vain hopes of the
future, but a joyful experience of real
salvation and an unexampled amount of
moral energy.
The exaggerated "Consistency," however,
should not keep back others from following
the method in a sounder way — this was
rightly maintained by Professor K. Lake
at the Congress.' We have a very
1 See also the remarkable book of H. Monnier,
La mission historique de Je'sus, 1906; and Abbe"

60 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
remarkable instance thereof in a recent
American contribution by Professor Shailer
Matthews : The Messianic Hope in the New
Testament, 1905, a book whose very title,
when compared with Dr. Kennedy's well-
known book on St. Paul's Conception of
the Last Things, 1904,' shows how much
the view has changed : it is not the
material of eschatological notions and
doctrines, but it is their living force and
influence upon the piety and the whole
life of their believers, which is discussed
here. At this point we may stop our historical
inquiry into the different ways of dealing
with our problem.
Loisy's Les e'vangiles synoptiques, 1907-8, together
with the fair criticism pronounced in C. Pie-
penoning, Jesus historique, 1909.
1 Cp. also W. O. E. Oesterley, B.D., The doctrine
of the Last Things, fewish and Christian, 1908.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 61
II
The word eschatology has very different
meanings. There was a time, some fifty
years ago, and it lasts perhaps till now,
when people, talking about eschatology,
did not mean to say anything else than
what happens after death: "It is appointed
unto men once to die, and after this cometh
judgment" (Heb. ix. 27). Now we
know better that eschatology is the
doctrine of the last things as understood
by late Jewish teaching. And latterly
we have come to use the word now to
express a certain mode of feeling, not
so much the different opinions on some
points of eschatology as the whole fashion
of mind produced by the belief in a near
approach of the end. It is in this last
sense that the word is taken here, viz., as
signifying some idea which exercised a

62 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
spiritual influence on the mind of Jesus
and His disciples.
To understand this we must bear in
mind what the belief of Jewish people in
*
regard to the last things was in former
times, and what was the evolution which
this belief underwent.
i. The religion of Israel was, as you
know, national in a far stricter sense than
we can use this word of the religions of
the Greeks or the Romans or other
peoples. It meant not only that every
member of the nation by his birth was
to be an adherent of this religion, but
that the very subject of the religion was
the nation, not the individual. Israel as
a nation was the chosen people of God;
it was in the nation's history that God
revealed Himself to mankind, it was to
the people that He had given all His
promises, the individuals having no right

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 63
for themselves, but only as members of
the nation. It was their happiness to
belong to this chosen people of God, and
their hope and aim that their children
or grandchildren perhaps would participate
in the glorious fulfilment of God's promises
to His people. To be sure, at a later
time, let us say from the time of the
Maccabean revival, a more individualistic
conception began to spread among the
Jewish people : it may have been sug
gested by the individualistic doctrines of
the Persian religion, as some recent
scholars maintain, or it may have come
out of this very Hellenistic influence, so
strong at the time, against which the
Maccabean movement was directed. Its
deeper source, however, is to be looked
for in the Maccabean movement itself :
the Jews of this time, prepared as they
were by Persian and Hellenistic concep-

64 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
tions, could not think of God as leaving
without any personal reward those who
gave up even their life for His sake.
It appeared to them impossible, incom
patible with God's righteousness, that the
martyrs should die without any compen
sation. It was as a benefit on behalf
of the martyrs that Jewish religion asked
at first for a personal continuation of life
after death. But note : it is not a
continuation in our sense of the word.
Death comes in and separates body and
soul. Neither of them is living when
separated from the other. They are both
in an estate of unconscious existence which
you may rightly compare to sleep. The
body is in the tomb, the soul in the
so-called She61, which is not to be
identified with Hell, but rather with the
Hades of the Greeks, where the souls
live their life as shades. This existence —

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 65
if we may call it existence, being quite
unconscious — lasts until that great day
when God fulfils His promises to the
nation. Then, but only then, those who
are to participate in this glorious and
happy time of salvation will be awakened,
both body and soul will come out of
their different receptacles, and will be
united, and so the man will be able to
enjoy a new life in company with all those
who are alive then. So, you see, the old
national conception of the last things has
not given place to another one of more
Hellenistic and individualistic type ; it is
still the old Jewish notion of the nation
as the subject, only enlarged by the idea
of a bodily resurrection of some earlier
members of the people.
There is a splendid sermon of the
late Principal John Caird, of Glasgow,
in his University sermons, upon Hebrews
Eschatology. 6

66 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
xi. 39, 40 : " And these all having
obtained a good report through faith,
received not the promise, God having
provided some better thing for us that
they without us should not be made
perfect." Dealing with the idea of "Com
parative resurrection" the Principal says
some most beautiful and stimulating things
of great practical value for the religious
life. But he treats the question as a
matter of speculation, and not having
first gone through these late Jewish
conceptions, he misses just the one im
portant point to be noticed from the
standpoint of the modern historical method,
viz., that we have in those words the
Christian adaptation of that Jewish notion :
salvation will come for all those who
deserve it, but only when it comes for
the nation.
This view is quite different from what

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 67
we are accustomed to, and I would like
the reader clearly to understand the great
importance of this difference. The Jewish
conception, by keeping to the national
idea, has always an historical orientation :
it is based upon that notion of two ages,
one which is now, and another to come ;
the present bad, sinful, full of oppression,
the future good, holy, happy. On the
other hand, Greek, and later Christian
thought, more individualising in its nature,
goes rather in the line of a local than of
a temporal contrast : happiness is not here,
but you can find it elsewhere. Or, to
make this a little more clear, one might
say that, in the case of the Jews, possi
bility of salvation, being an expectation
and not yet a reality, caused the stress to
be laid upon the time when, while in the
case of the Greeks, possibility of salvation
being conceived as a present fact, caused

68 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
the stress to be laid upon the place where.1
You know the islands of the Hesperides
far in the West, where the happy heroes
enjoyed a god-like, everlasting life ; you
know the two parts in the Hades, one
dark and harmful, a real hell for the
sinners, the other a bright and happy
abode for pious and righteous men. In
the latest stage of Greek religion and
philosophy it is rather the contrast of
above and below, of heaven and earth.
And you see that this is what most
Christian people think of as the original
Christian conception : that after their life
on this sorrowful earth has come to an
end, they immediately will go to another
life, a life of glory and happiness in
1 Or better still, as my friend Professor Lake
put it in a conversation, we had, after attending
this lecture, "the Jew is separated from the
realm of bliss by time, the Greek by space."

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 69
heaven. This is what they call salvation.
Now without entering into the dogmatic
question of what will happen to us after
death, we may safely say that this is not
the original Christian conception of salva
tion, which was almost in the line of
Jewish thought, not perhaps so much
national, but collective, historical : a time
was to be expected when all who believed
and placed their hope in God as the
Saviour of His faithful people should see
His glorious salvation, not only the quick,
but also those who had died before,
because they would rise again at that
very moment.
2. This salvation might be conceived
in many different ways : the mass of
Jewish people took it in a political sense,
either purely national : viz., that the yoke
of heathen tyranny should be broken off,
and Israel, free from all oppression, should

70 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
enjoy his own land, his Holy City with
the temple of God, and live a happy life
under his God's gracious guidance, God's
royalty being identified with the dominion
of Israel over all other nations. Or else
the conception was rather mixed up with
party-morals : the salvation would come
for that very part of Israel which remained
faithful to the Lord their God, which,
humble and poor, had to stand the oppres
sion by that proud, rich company of un
righteous and godless men, who ruled, by
their own will, over God's people, so that
the salvation was to be seen in a true
restoration of the theocracy against the
tyranny of the Hasmonean or Sadducean
priests or princes like Herod and his sons.
Besides these there was a third form of
conception, which, compared with the two
political ones already mentioned, may be
called mythological, as it deals not so

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY 71
much with human powers in opposition to
God's kingdom, but with the spiritual
powers of the devil and his demons,
always in rebellion against God, and trying
to make men offend against God's holy
will and law with the aim of bringing
them under their own pitiless dominion.
There are only a few traces of this last
conception in pre-Christian Jewish escha
tology, especially in the book of Enoch,
where the fallen angels, the so-called
Egregores (watchmen), play a great part.
Now we may say that in whatever way
salvation was conceived, the very aim of
Jewish religion was to get this salvation,
not so much to ensure a share in it
(because most Jews supposed this to be
their natural right), but to get God to
bring it. Because it was not to be
brought by means of human operation. It
was supposed to be a quite superhuman,

72 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
supernatural acting by God Himself, send
ing His salvation to His people. Only
that this faithful people may influence His
motion by pressing on Him in prayer,
fasting and doing His ordinances in the
law. As to how God would do it, there
was no certainty ; either He would come
by Himself, breaking open the heaven
and descending, or He would send His
Messiah, the blessed one, His beloved,
His Son, the Son of man, the Son of
David. This coming would be preceded
by various signs. The heathen power
would rise to an almost unheard of level
of tyranny, cruelty and abomination, the
iniquity of the godless and unrighteous
would join with them, so that the apostasy
from the one God, the living and true
one, and His worship to the idols and all
the sins of idolatry would become general ;
there would be signs in the heaven and

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY \7jJ
on earth, the sun giving no more light,
the moon being changed into blood, the
stars falling from heaven, earthquakes,
famines, pestilences, frightening mankind
everywhere. Then at the very culmina
tion of horrors the Messiah would appear
in a miraculous way, and by His wonderful
power He would destroy all His enemies,
and by the aid of His angels collect His
chosen people from all parts of the world,
and reign over them in justice and peace,
filled as He was with God's Holy Spirit,
the Spirit of righteousness and truth.
3. It is not necessary to go further into
detail now, because all this is very well
known, especially through the works of
Professor Charles. We only repeat, that
there was no self-consistent doctrine of
eschatology among the Jews of Jesus' time,
and that the influence of eschatology was
rather restricted to some circles, the life

3) THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
of the people being occupied by the busi
ness of the present time and ruled by the
heavy yoke of Pharisaic ordinances. It
was really something new to the people
when John the Baptist started his preach
ing in the wilderness of Judaea: "Repent
ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
And whatever may have been the
[position taken by Jesus in regard to
eschatology, there can be no doubt that
eschatology was much more important in
early Christianity than in late Judaism.
i It was so, because the messianic hope had
found in Jesus its proper object : since
Jesus had appeared, people were convinced
that His glorious advent (the Parousia)
was to be expected at the earliest term.
This is the main distinction between early
Christian and late Jewish eschatology : all
has received a stricter form, many possi
bilities being excluded by the very fact

THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY

<g)

that it was Jesus, with all His personal
characteristics, who was to be expected ; all
has been brought nearer, the fact that the
Messiah was known, that it was Jesus, and
that Jesus had disappeared only for a short
time, giving urgency to all expectations.
There was even an increasing tendency
towards eschatological occupation in the
second half of the first century, the very
time when our Gospels were written. So
the problem comes before us, whether the
eschatology of the Gospels belongs to the
original stock of Jesus-tradition, or is due
to this later eschatological inclination of'
Christianity, which, borrowing from Judaism,
transformed the gospel into a rather escha
tological teaching. It is lastly the ques
tion, how far Jesus can be brought under
the law of historical continuity, He Himself
being dependent backwards on late Judaism
and influencing forwards early Christianity

76 THE PROBLEM AND ITS HISTORY
— and how far He must be regarded as
an exceptional being outside the operation
of this law, unrooted in His nation, and
misunderstood by His followers.

Various Tendencies in the Transmission
of the Gospel. The Eschatological
Stock of Jesus-Tradition

LECTURE II
VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE TRANSMIS
SION OF THE GOSPEL. THE ESCHATO
LOGICAL STOCK OF JESUS-TRADITION
TTAVING defined the problem as it
¦*• ¦*¦ stands to-day in our first lecture,
we now go on to try to settle first what
is the Gospel-tradition about eschatology,
and what measure of certainty we have
to make out our Lord's own words and
meaning. I
There is not only some vague possibility
of alterations brought into the Gospel in
79

80 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
the course of its transmission, but there is
plenty of evidence that sayings of Jesus
were coloured afterwards, and this at first
[y^] by eschatological additions and
changes. We may confine our investi
gation to three instances :
i. The saying against those who say
" Lord, Lord" is given by Matthew vii. 21
and Luke vi. 46, both passages belonging
to the sermon on the mount. In Matthew
vii. 22, 23 herewith is combined another
saying, which is found in Luke xiii. 25-27
in quite a different context. We are not
concerned here with this second saying — we
may remark by the way that Luke has
evidently the original form, not only in the
shape of the parable, but also in the
features claimed by the unfortunate people
outdoors, which are with Luke rather
ordinary experiences of Jesus' lifetime
while Matthew puts in extraordinary

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 81
experiences of the apostolic age ; — at
all events, this second word is eschato
logical in its substance : it deals with the
last judgment. Not so the first saying ;
as it runs in Luke, "And why call ye me,
Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I
say ? " there is nothing in it, which tends
towards eschatology. Now there can be
hardly any doubt that Luke has the
original form of this saying, and that the
Matthasan form "Not every one that says
unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the
will of my Father which is in heaven"
with its unmistakable eschatological colour
ing, strengthened by the introduction of
" in that day " in the next sentence, is
due to the combination with that other
saying. It is a well-known feature in the
composition of our First Gospel — and we
shall see other instances of the same
Eschatology. 7

82 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
immediately — that words are brought into
a closer connexion by conforming them
one to the other.
The priority of the non-eschatological
form of this saying is supported (i) by
the parable which follows immediately in
Luke and only a few verses later on in
Matthew as well in quite the same form,
so that we may trace it back to Q, the
parable, I mean, of the house built on the
rock or upon the sand, a parable which is
not likely to be taken in an eschatological
sense ; and (2) by the comparison of another
saying which has much affinity to it, Jesus'
saying about His relations : "For whosoever
shall do the will of God, the same is my
brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark iii.
35; cp. Matt. xii. 50, Luke viii. 21). It
is not said : I will, at the day of judgment,
declare him to be my brother, &c, but "he
is." So it is a purely moral statement

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 83
without the peculiar taste of eschatology.
And this is all the more remarkable as it
is found in the Marcan tradition.
2. The next instance of this kind of
transformation I find in the parables of the
tares and of the net, forming originally
a couple of parables as so many others,
now separated in Matthew xiii. 24-30
(with an additional interpretation in v. 36-
43) and xiii. 47-50. The evangelist sees
in both parables a description of the last
judgment, when "the Son of Man shall send
forth his angels and they shall gather out
of his kingdom all things that cause
stumbling, and them that do iniquity, and
shall cast them into the furnace of fire,
there shall be the weeping and gnashing
of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine
forth as the sun in the kingdom of their
Father." " The harvest is the end of the
world" xiii. 39, this is the main point of

84 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
Matthew's interpretation, from which all
the parable is to be explained. But take
the parables by themselves, and you will
see that there is no necessity for this in
terpretation. Jesus is not describing a
single act but something which occurs to
men at any time. As sowing and harvest
are repeated annually and the gathering
and sifting of fishes is the fisherman's daily
work, so it is some rule for daily life which
Jesus put into the disciples' mind by telling
them these parables. Many interpreters
since the time of Tertullian have found
here some rule of ecclesiastical conduct :
the Church as a corpus mixtum has to
contain sinners as well as saints until the
day of God's judgment. But this is
neither the meaning of the evangelist,
who in his allegorical interpretation makes
the field signify the world, not the Church,
and neglects the servants of the house-

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 85
holder altogether, the problem Matthew
is interested in being not the composition
of the Christian Church and the conduct
of its leaders on account of bad members,
but the situation of Christianity in the
midst of the world of unbelievers, a close
parallel to John xvii. n, 14: "These are
in the world," "not of the world." Nor
is it the original meaning of the parable,
this giving merely the general moral rule :
" Do not put in your hands before things are
ready ; everything will, at the proper time,
be revealed for what it is ; leave it to God's
care — the same rule as we have it in the
famous counsel of Gamaliel, Acts v. 35 ff.
3. The main instance of this intrusion
of eschatology into the Gospel-tradition
is the great eschatological sermon found
in Mark xiii., Matthew xxiv. and Luke xxi.
It was in the year 1864 that Colani and
Weizsacker, one independent of the other,

86 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
came to the conclusion that this is not the
report of an original sermon of Jesus, but
a composite work, mixing original sayings
of Christ with parts of a little apocalypse,
as to the origin of which there was and
is still some difference of opinion, some
scholars maintaining with Weizsacker, that
it was a Jewish document, while the
majority agrees in acknowledging the
Christian character and is inclined to
identify this little apocalyptic fly-leaf with
the revelation spoken of by Eusebius,
H.E. III. v. 3, as having caused the
Christians to move from the Holy City
before its fall. As reconstructions of this
little apocalypse are easily accessible, e.g.,
in Professor Charles' book on Eschatology,
I may confine myself to a few remarks :
(i) As we have only Mark (Matthew
borrowing from Mark ! and Luke colour-
1 I do not think that two or three instances,

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 87
ing Mark's narrative), it is impossible to
reconstruct the actual words of Mark's
source ; it contained probably verses 7, 8,
14-20, 24-27 ; but it is uncertain if some
words, such as verses 15 and 18, are
perhaps additions by Mark, and, on the
other hand, if we have to add verses 21-23
and perhaps also verse 30. (2) We find
described only a few remarkable features :
in the first part, the beginnings of horrors,
a general motion and revolution among
the peoples and all kinds of frightful
events ; in the second part, the cul
mination of horrors, something mysterious,
Mark using the same words as Daniel,
but contrary to the Greek gender as a
masculine, showing thereby that he thinks
of an individual, some Antichrist. With
given by B. Weiss and others, are enough to
prove that Matthew had independent knowledge
of that apocalypse.

88 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
the notion of supreme horror are com
bined two different ideas of getting out
of them : a local one — flying into the
mountains, and this is the pet point of the
little apocalypse, marked by calling the
attention of the reader (you see it is not
a sermon of Jesus) ; and on the other hand
a temporal one — shortening of the time by
the powerful interfering of the Lord (you
see again, it is not Jesus who is speaking
here) ; and in the third part, through a
terrible motion of all the elements, the
glorious advent of the Messiah. There is
in all this, not even in the last part, nothing
of peculiar Christian notions which we
ought to trace back to Jesus Himself.
They are common apocalyptic ideas. And
yet, all is so short, so brief in this little
apocalypse, nothing unnecessary, only main
points. This is, I believe, the proof-mark
of early Christian in comparison with late

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 89
Jewish literature, according to Wellhausen's
well-known remark regarding the Gospel
and rabbinic literature : that all that is in
the Gospel is to be found there too, yes,
all, and much more. It is especially the
lack of all national and political elements in
this much-condensed little apocalypse which
makes it quite clear — as far as I may be
able to pronounce judgment — that the con
ception is an early Christian one, using the
materials of late Jewish eschatology in its
own way. (3) The very fact that Mark
could give this little apocalypse as a
sermon of Jesus, taken together with this
other fact, that several words of the
apocalypse have parallels in well-attested
sayings of Jesus ' and that the sayings
1 Cp. Mark xiii. 15, 16 with Luke xvii. 31 ;
Mark xiii. 21-23 vvith Luke xvii. 23 ; Matt. xxiv.
26 ; especially Mark xiii. 26 with viii. 38 and
xiv. 62.

90 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
combined with the apocalypse in Mark xiii.
bear nearly the same stamp,' proves that
the main ideas of this little fly-leaf are not
far removed from Jesus' own opinions.
But the fact remains, that it is an eschato
logical addition to the original Jesus-
tradition.2 These three instances of alteration by
intrusion of eschatology could easily be
multiplied. But if one were to conclude
that all eschatological material found actu
ally in the Gospel was but later addition
1 So Mark xiii. 6 is nearly identical with xiii.
21 f.=Luke xvii. 23.
2 Mark, taking this little apocalypse from
about 68 A.D. into his gospel, has his analogon
in the author of Q, putting into Jesus' mouth
a quotation from an apocryphal book of Wisdom
dating probably not earlier than 69 A.D. [the
Zacharias son of Barachia being identical with
the one mentioned by Josephus, B. J. IV. v. 4
(335)], see Luke xi. 49-51, Matt, xxiii. 34-36.

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 91
or transformation, one would be wide of
the mark. False generalisation is the
worst of all faults in method. Plenty of
eschatological sayings remain, which must
come from original tradition.
Before starting, however, our proper
investigation, let us turn to another form
of alteration [2?], eschatological utterances
of Jesus being transfigured into historical
predictions — especially by Luke.
i. There is, e.g., Christ's saying in
regard to Jerusalem, taken evidently from
Q, both in Matthew xxiii. 37-39 and
Luke xiii. 34-35. The closing words :
"And I say unto you, Ye shall not see
me, until ye shall say, Blessed is he that
cometh in the name of the Lord" are
capable of a twofold interpretation, either
eschatological or — as they recur at Jesus'
entrance into Jerusalem — historical. Now
Luke placing the saying long before this

92 VARIOUS TENDENCIES IN THE
entrance, understood probably, and liked
his readers to understand, in the latter
sense : an historical prediction of the
Messianic entrance : whereas Matthew,
recording the word only after this
entrance, took it evidently in an escha
tological sense. And he was right in his
understanding, as far as I can see.
2. A similar instance of transformation is
given in Luke's reproduction of Mark xiii.,
the already mentioned synoptic apocalypse:
" The abomination of desolation," spoken of
by Mark and Matthew as standing where
he ought not (or in the holy place, Matthew)
is paraphrased by Luke xxi. 20 in the
following way : "But when ye see Jerusalem
compassed with armies, then know that her
desolation is at hand." It is the same
word tpvuwo-ig, used here instead of some
more usual expressions for destruction, as
Karaarpofri, KaOalpeo-ig, K<zra/3oX)j, avarpoirri, which

TRANSMISSION OF THE GOSPEL 93
betrays Luke borrowing from the Danielic
formula in Mark and taking the mysterious
expression in the sense of some prophetic
utterances.' In this way he substitutes
definite historical prediction for an obscure
eschatological prophecy.2

1 IpvptooiQ is found in LXX=r'?'K' in Jer. vii. 34,
xxii. 5, xxxii. 18, li. 6, 22, but connected with
•yjj, in connexion with Jerusalem in Daniel ix. 2.
Josephus uses aXwo-ig B.J. I. i. 4 (10); VI. x. 1
(441), sometimes KaTao-Kafri, ibid. VI. x. 1 (440).
For other equivalents see Corpus glossariorum
latinorum ed. Loewe et Goetz, vi. 333, s.v.
destructio. 2 Another view has been proposed recently by
my friend, Professor F. Spitta, in a suggestive
study, " Die grosse eschatologische Rede Jesu "
in Theol. Stud. u. Krit., 1909, 348-401 ; retract
ing his own former hypothesis of a Jewish
apocalypse inserted in Matt, xxiv., Spitta main
tains that Luke gives the original form of Jesus'
answer to His disciples, the genuine prediction
of the destruction of the temple being changed

94 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
If this be granted we have to reckon
with the possibility that the number of
eschatological sayings found in the earliest
tradition has undergone diminution as
well as enrichment by later alterations.
II.
We now proceed to ask how much
there is of assured eschatological matter
in the sayings of our Lord.
i. To begin with the main object of
His preaching ; the kingdom of God is
in its origin undoubtedly an entirely
eschatological notion. It is not God's
government over the world, not His
ruling His people, as usually in the
Psalter, when there is said, " God rules,"
" God is king," but it is a peculiar
in Caligula's time into the apocalyptic notion
known from Daniel.

OF JESUS-TRADITION 95
estate of things when God is reigning
without any opposition, neither by man,
nor by the evil spirits. Now as John
the Baptist (Matt. iii. 2) preaches that
this kingdom of God is at hand,' so
the preaching of Jesus begins with the
very same announcement : " the time is
fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at
hand" (Mark i. 15 ; cp. Matt iv. 17).
We have perhaps a still better instance
of this in the Lord's prayer : if Jesus
makes His disciples pray : " Thy kingdom
come," then it is not to be taken as
already come but as to be hoped and
1 We may perhaps be not allowed to take
these words as a genuine rendering of John's
message, because in Mark i. 4, 8 and Luke iii.
3, 7 ff. as well as in Matt. iii. 7 ff. he is
represented rather as announcing an almost
severe judgment. But this has to be taken
only as a beginning or rather the means of
making way for the kingdom of God.

96 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
prayed for. The next petition, given
only by Matthew, " Thy will be done,
as in heaven, so on earth," makes it
clear what the kingdom of God was
understood to be : a moral estate of
mankind wherein God's will was done
without exception, without any opposition
by personal sin or by contrary forces in
society. The kingdom of God, as it
would be conceived by those people who
heard Jesus preaching, was to be some
thing most desirable, an estate of com
plete happiness, something that was
worthy the hardest efforts and even the
greatest loss ; you ought to give every
thing for it, even your own life. But at
the same time people would understand
that it was something to be looked for
which you cannot make by your own
efforts, but you have to wait for it until
God brings it about.

OF JESUS-TRADITION 97
2. Now the main question is for us
as it was for the men of that time :
What was the relation of Jesus to this
kingdom of God ? Except two or three
passages which we are to consider later
on, He never says that He is bringing
it into being, but He speaks of Himself
as of the Son of Man, a title which, as
we know already, had a Messianic
content ; He never says directly that He
is the Messiah ; He even declines to be
called the Son of David. And yet His
whole appearance, the way He manifests
Himself and the authoritative tone which
He adopts show that He is the very
kind of man to proclaim Himself the
Messiah. And at last, when He is set
before the High Court of the people and
asked in the most solemn way by the
High Priest upon His claim: "Art thou
the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" then
Eschatology. 8

98 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
He said: "I am, and ye shall see the Son
of Man sitting at the right hand of power,
and coming with the clouds of heaven
(Mark xiv. 61, 62). This is an unmis
takable expression of His claim for
Messiahship. And even if we would
prefer the form in which Matthew xxvi.
64 puts the words : " Thou hast said ;
nevertheless I say unto you, henceforth
ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at
the right hand of power, and coming on
the clouds of heaven," we ought to say
that it is a form of restrained assertion
which we may paraphrase : Yes, but it
is not I who have used the actual word,
but thou hast used it.
Now it seems to me to be impossible
to maintain, as some scholars do, that
Jesus denies his Messiahship altogether
(so Dalman, Merx), or that He makes
a distinction between Himself and the

OF JESUS-TRADITION 99
Messiah to be expected according to the
words of Psalm ex. i and Daniel vii. 13.
With more probability it has been said
that He claims Messiahship not as His
present state, but only for a future time.
He is not the Messiah, but He will
be the Messiah. This notion of a
Messiah to come, first put forth, so far
as I know, by Joh. Weiss, has met with
an almost unusual degree of assent. It
has been accepted by H. Holtzmann,
A. Harnack,' H. Monnier,2 A. Loisy,
and many others. Indeed, there are
some difficulties in the life of Jesus
which would find the easiest explana
tion by assuming that Jesus, persuaded
as He was that He was the Son of

1 Spriiche und Reden Jesu (= Beitrage II.),
1907, 169.
2 La mission historique de J hus, 1906, 64.

100 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
God, the chosen one to bring salva
tion, nevertheless, conceived Himself not
to be the Messiah, but only to be
destined to be the Messiah in a later
time : Messias destinatus, Messias futurus.
His appearance, resembling rather a rabbi
or at most a prophet, was so far from
the popular notion of the Messiah, who
should be a glorious and mighty king,
destroying all his enemies by means of
his power, that we easily could imagine
Him taking His present appearance only
as a preparatory one, His office being
to prepare the people for His coming in
glory as the Messiah. So He would
have been His own forerunner, His own
John the Baptist. But this was not His
view, neither was it the opinion of His
judges. The question laid before Him by
the High Priest was, " Art thou the
Christ the Son of the Blessed?" And

OF JESUS-TRADITION 101
Jesus answered, "I am." He did not
tell them : "Not yet, but if you will bring
Me to death, then I shall be it." He
simply replied, "I am, and you will see."
The condemnation by the High Council
as well as the accusation brought before
the Roman Governor gives, I think, suffi
cient evidence that His claim on Messiah-
ship was understood not as that of a
Messiah destinatus, but as that of a
present Messiah. It is just the contrast
between this claim and the very appear
ance of this humble prisoner brought
before him which puzzles Pilate so that
he would have refused to execute the
sentence, except for fear of the Jews,
who frightened him by the Emperor's
wrath. The title on the Cross is by
itself a convincing argument against this
modern theory of a Messiahship of the
future.

102 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
3. It is quite certain, I should think,
that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah.
But it is equally certain that He speaks
of His coming again in glory and power.
If one would reject the testimony of
Mark xiv. 62 pleading that there was
none of the disciples present at the trial,
one must accept the combined testimony
of other utterances. When speaking about
the necessity of confession he says : " For
whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of
my words in this adulterous and sinful
generation, the Son of Man also shall be
ashamed of him, when he cometh in the
glory of his Father with the holy angels "
(Mark viii. 38 ; cp. Matt. xvi. 27 ; Luke
ix. 26). When asked by James and John
to give them the places of honour on His
right and on His left in His glory, as
Mark x. 37, or in His kingdom, as
Matthew xx. 21 puts the question, He

OF JESUS-TRADITION 103
does not reject this notion, but only
makes a very hard condition, and refers
the right of bestowing those places to
the Father (Mark x. 35-40 ; Matt. xx.
20-23). '
The warnings against false Messiahs
(cp. Mark xiii. 6, 21, and Luke xvii. 23,
24, Matt. xxiv. 23-28) presuppose the idea
of His own coming again.
There are many parables, dealing with
the unexpected returning of the Lord, or
the sudden coming of some one : Mark xiii.
33-37 gives only short extracts, which,
however, show he knew a much larger
tradition, which one may try to reconstruct

1 This has a remarkable parallel in the
promise given to the twelve that they shall
take part in the messianic judgment sitting on
twelve thrones (Matt. xix. 28 ; Luke xxii.
29, 30 [Q?]>

104 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
by the help of the First and Third
Gospels. So far we have gathered mainly from
the Marcan tradition. Mark, it has been
said, is the strongest supporter of eschato
logical views ; and, in fact, there are some
passages where the other main sources
have a less eschatological colouring : not
only Luke, who reproduces Jesus' answer
to the High Priest without the closing
sentence {coming, &c), allowing, thereby,
for a more spiritual interpretation of the
rest {sitting at the right hand), and so
weakening the eschatological impression,
but also Q, of equal value with Mark in
regard to the certainty of tradition ; so
instead of the words quoted above from
Mark viii. 38, " The Son of Man also shall
be ashamed of him, when he cometh in the
glory of his Father with the holy angels,"
we read in Q (Luke xii. 9 and Matt. x.

OF JESUS-TRADITION 105
33) "He that denieth me in the presence
of men shall be denied in the presence of
the angels of God" (or according to
Matthew, "before my Father which is in
heaven"), a phrase which, intended to be
understood in an eschatological sense, is
capable, however, of a more spiritual
interpretation not showing that peculiar
note of time characteristic of Jewish
eschatology. But we must not generalise this fact
and draw the conclusion that eschatology
supported only or mostly by Mark is his
own addition, and therefore not to be
taken as a genuine part of Jesus' teach
ing. Neither Q nor the other non-Marcan
sources of our Gospel-tradition are bare
of eschatology ; on the contrary, they
support it strongly.
We have mentioned already the promise
made to the disciples (Matt. xix. 28 ;

106 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
Luke xxii. 29-30) ; Jesus' woe over Jeru
salem (Matt, xxiii. 39 ; Luke xiii. 35), with
its final sentences : " Ye shall not see me
henceforth, till ye shall say : Blessed is
He that cometh in the name of the
Lord." The admonition for readiness gains
strength from the argument: "For in
an hour that ye think not the Son of
Man cometh " (Matt. xxiv. 44 ; cp. Luke
xii. 40).
The coming of the Son of Man is said
to be like a lightning (Matt. xxiv. 27 ;
cp. Luke xvii. 24).
The want of vigilance and the careless
ness of mankind before the coming of the
Son of Man is compared with the state of
mind in the days of Noah (Matt. xxiv. 2,7 ',
cp. Luke xvii. 26).
All this shows that the notion of the
coming of the Son of Man as something

OF JESUS-TRADITION 107
still to be expected is a commonplace in
Gospel-tradition and has to be traced back
to Jesus Himself.
4. There is another remark to be made
in connexion with these utterances. It is
hardly said anywhere how the coming of
the Son of Man will be, except that it
will be suddenly, surprising. Sometimes
we find used the words of Daniel : " on "
or "with the clouds of heaven." Sometimes
angels are spoken of as following Him.
His glory is mentioned. If the single
phrase is capable of a spiritualising inter
pretation, the impression made by the
whole set of passages will be that it is
some miraculous, supernatural, but at the
same time external and visible event in
history, or better still, some catastrophe
at the very end of history ; in one word,
some really eschatological fact, which is
meant.

108 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
It is important to settle this before we
go on, because the spiritualising tendency
of modern theology has tried to escape
from this conclusion by dealing with every
passage by itself. So making one after
the other say what they were wanted to
say, the interpreter was able to declare,
that there is no eschatology at all.
Take, e.g., Jesus' answer before the
High Priest : "Ye shall see the Son of
Man sitting at the right hand of power,
and coming with the clouds of heaven."
Professor Haupt says : How can they see
Him sitting at the right hand of power?
this can be meant only in a spiritual way :
they shall see His influence in the wonder
ful propagation of His gospel ; and so the
next sentence, and coming, &c, is but
another illustration of the same idea : they
will see His influence in the judgment
passed upon their own people for having

OF JESUS-TRADITION 109
rejected Him. This seems quite probable
But taken together with all the other
utterances we have just considered, this
explanation will hardly satisfy any one. If
these words are spoken by Jesus — and I
see no reason for denying this — they must
be taken as they stand, as an expression
for some really eschatological event.
5. A further point of no less importance
is the following : Jesus says : "Ye shall
see." In connexion with a spiritual inter
pretation this may well be explained as
comprehending not so much the judges
themselves as their children and grand
children and all other generations to
follow. Taken together with our realistic
interpretation it can only mean : you by
yourselves, not men of a later time. The
present generation is the latest. It is
destined to live to see the end of all
history.

110 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
This interpretation is confirmed by a
set of sayings dealing with the notion
of the present generation : We read in
Mark xiii. 30, and in the parallel passages
Matthew xxiv. 34, Luke xxi. 32, " Verily
I say unto you: This generation shall not
pass away, until all these things be accom
plished." As this saying is found in the
eschatological chapter some writers main
tain that it is a part of that fly-leaf which
we found to be a later Christian apoca
lypse. This is possible, but I think it is
equally possible and even more probable
that it belongs to the genuine stock of
sayings of Jesus, which were mixed up
with that little apocalypse. At any rate,
it is quite in the same line with those
other words of Jesus, " Ye shall see," &c.
It seems to be contradicted, however,
by another saying. When asked by the
Pharisees to give a sign from heaven,

OF JESUS-TRADITION 111
Jesus sighed deeply in His spirit and
said, " Why doth this generation seek a
sign ? Verily, I say unto you : There
shall no sign be given unto this genera
tion." So Mark viii. 12. We are accus
tomed to another form of this answer,
adding " but the sign of Jonah." So we
read in Matthew xvi. 4, the parallel
passage to Mark viii. 12, as well as in
Matthew xii. 39 and Luke xi. 29, two
parallel passages taken probably from Q.
Now as Matthew usually conforms the
sayings he borrows from different sources,
the testimony of Matthew xvi. 4 is of no
value. We have in reality only Mark
against Q, Q giving the additional words,
Mark omitting them. Which form is
genuine ? Against the vast majority of
writers I think Wellhausen is right here
in maintaining the superiority of the
Marcan tradition. Nobody until this day

112 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
has succeeded in giving a fair explanation
of what the sign of Jonah might mean.
It is, I dare say, commonly acknow
ledged to-day that the interpretation
given already by Matthew xii. 40 as
pointing to the three days and three
nights which Jonah spent in the whale's
belly and Jesus likewise in the tomb or
in Hell, is wrong. The preaching of
Jonah, which caused the people of Nineveh
to repent, can hardly be called a sign.
Now, as our saying is combined in Q
with another saying dealing with the re
pentance of the people of Nineveh at
the preaching of Jonah, it seems to me
highly probable that this other saying
gave rise to the addition in the former
saying, and that therefore Mark has pre
served its original form. Jesus does not
promise any sign, but He denies to the
present generation the sign which they

OF JESUS-TRADITION 113
ask for, viz., the Messianic sign, which is,
of course, to be distinguished from His
powerful acts of mercy, these in the
oldest tradition never being called o-jjjueTov
sign. So Jesus by this answer denies
that this generation will see the coming
of the Messiah.
The contradiction between this saying
and the other two sayings mentioned
before, exists, I think, only in appearance.
The solution is to be found in another
saying, recorded by Mark ix. i (cp. Matt.
xvi. 28 and Luke ix. 27) ; " Verily I
say unto you : There be some here of
them that stand by which shall in no
wise taste of death, till they see the
kingdom of God come with power." This
is not to be taken in a spiritual sense ;
it refers to the real Parousia. This
will be in the lifetime of the present
generation. But, this is the main point
Eschatology. 9

114 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
to be remarked here : Jesus does not
say that all who stand around will be
still alive. He solemnly declares : there
will be some still alive when it happens
to come. This looks rather like a later
restriction made at a time when most
of them who had been with Jesus had
gone already without having seen His
Parousia. But taken together with those
other sayings it will prove to be the
original conception of Jesus, explaining
what He meant by generation, when He
said: " no sign to this generation," and
"this generation shall not pass" on the
other side. We find a similar instance
in the Old Testament — and we may
suppose Jesus bearing this in mind — viz.,
that of all the generation which went
out from Egypt only two, Joshua son
of Nun, and Caleb son of Jephunneh,
were able to enter the land of promise

OF JESUS-TRADITION 115
(Num. xiv. 30, 38, cp. 1 Cor. x. 5).
This parallel makes it quite clear that
"this generation" is not to be taken in
the sense of this nation (as some in
terpreters ventured to explain), but in the
chronological sense of the word : the men
just now living. This generation got the
advantage of seeing God's highest reve
lation, compared with which even the
time of the patriarchs and of Solomon
counted for nothing ; but having proved
unworthy of such grace, this generation
was to be called an evil and adulterous
one. So it resulted that, while the blood
of all prophets would be required of
this generation (Luke xi. 51), or [in
other words] all these things would come
upon this generation (Matt, xxiii. 36),
only few of them would be worthy to
live to see the establishment of salvation,
the coming of the Son of Man. It is

116 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
indeed, as we said before, in Jesus'
opinion, the last generation destined to
see the kingdom of God.
This, I think, is not in contradiction
with other sayings of Jesus : as, e.g., His
saying Mark xiii. 32 (cp. Matt. xxiv. 36) :
" Of that day or that hour knoweth no
one, not even the angels in heaven, neither
the Son, but the Father," ' because in
putting the date at the end of His
generation He gives no real date ; nor
by those two sayings dealing with the
spread of the Gospel, viz., Matt. x. 23,

1 It is an open question whether the words
" neither the Son " are to be omitted in the
text of Matthew or not. At all events they are
genuine in Mark. And so the question can be
only whether the omission is due to Matthew
himself or to a later copyist, the motive being
in both cases that the words seemed to be
derogatory to the divinity of Christ.

OF JESUS-TRADITION 117
" Ye shall not have gone through the
cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be
come " ; and on the other side, Mark xiii.
10 (cp. Matt. xxiv. 14) : " The gospel
must first be preached unto all nations,"
two statements contradicting one another
and showing neither of them the genuine
teaching of Jesus but the later views of
Jewish and Gentile Christianity. Jesus'
statement about the coming of the
kingdom in the lifetime of His own
generation is in full accordance with the
general tenour of His admonitions. When
He says, " Watch therefore : for ye know
not when the Lord of the house cometh "
(Mark xiii. 35 ; cp. Matt. xxiv. 42), He
addresses, undoubtedly, the men of His
own time, this and other parables having
no effect if the Parousia was not supposed
to occur in the lifetime of these men.
As a matter of fact He announces the

118 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
death of some of His disciples, e.g., the
sons of Zebedee (Mark x. 39 ; Matt.
xx. 23) as well as He foretells His own
death — I see no reason for treating this
with Ed. Schwartz as an ex eventu
prophecy — but this comes out rather as
an exception, the disciples not being
deprived by their martyrdom of the
benefit of partaking in the glorious
kingdom, no less than Jesus Himself,
who firmly believed in getting through
death to life, patronising in this depart
ment Pharisaic doctrine against Sadducean
unbelief, or rather protecting by His own
assent what was of real value in the
progress of Jewish religious thought, at
the same time improving it by putting
out from it all sensuousness, all elements
of worldly, chiliastic happiness : " For
when they shall rise from the dead, they
neither marry, nor are given in marriage,

OF JESUS-TRADITION 119
but are as angels in heaven " (Mark xii.
25 and par.).
In the same way, when Jesus speaks
of a meal where the sons of the kingdom
will be gathered with Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, we may conclude that this is
meant eschatologically, but not in a
chiliastic sense as a big dinner, where — as
it is represented sometimes in late Jewish
literature, the Leviathan will be given as
fish and the Behemoth as meat, and the
cups will be filled with wine without end.
As a matter of fact we find Jesus using
the very words of being at table, eating
bread and drinking the fruit of the vine
in the kingdom of God (Matt. viii. 11 ;
Luke xiii. 29, xiv. 15 ; Mark xiv. 25
c. par.) ; but here realistic interpretation
is out of place ; it is the popular way of
expressing supreme happiness, which Jesus
is using for something which is far

120 THE ESCHATOLOGICAL STOCK
beyond the literal sense of the words.
Nobody I trust would imagine Jesus fore
telling to His disciples the pleasures of a
dinner in the Messianic kingdom, even
when he takes the most realistic view of
Jesus' eschatology.

Two more Features in the Genuine
Jesus-Tradition

LECTURE III
TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE GENUINE
JESUS-TRADITION
"T)Y collecting and sifting the evidence
-*— afforded by our first three Gospels,
we found that notwithstanding a marked
tendency towards bringing in eschato
logical views there was a large enough
genuine stock of eschatological sayings
of Jesus to prove that He Himself be
lieved in a change of all things which
would come quickly, and not later than
the end of His own generation ; the
kingdom of God would then be estab
lished in its full glory and happiness by
123

124 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
His own coming in power and glory ; all
His believers, or rather, all pious and
good men, heathen as well as members
of the chosen people, participating in its
happy life. We do not see Jesus in
terested in the details of eschatology like
most of the apocalyptic writers of late
Judaism and early Christianity. For
Jesus' eschatology has only a twofold
significance: (i) it is a help for Him
to understand and make men under
stand His own position : being the
Messiah, the culmination in God's revela
tion to His people, final in all that
He does and says, He brings about the
kingdom of God ; and (2) it is a
motive in His admonitions : be ready, be
watchful, because the kingdom of God
is at hand.

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 125
I
But beside these clearly eschatological
utterances there is another set of sayings
dealing likewise with the notions of the
kingdom and of His Messiahship, but
showing quite a different aspect of them :
the kingdom is present, and Jesus, humble
and meek as He is, is the Messiah,
because He fulfils the expectation in its
true form and brings salvation in its
deepest sense.
A. i. When attacked on account of
His casting out devils, Jesus argues —
according to Mark iii. 24-27 — by two
parables : a kingdom divided against itself
cannot stand, and a man cannot enter
into a strong man's house and spoil his
goods except he first binds the strong
man. Q, represented by Luke xi. 19, 20
and Matthew xii. 27, 28, gives two more

126 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
arguments used on the same occasion by
Jesus. He refers to the casting out of
devils by the rabbis and their pupils, so
defending his own practice per analogiam ;
then He goes on to say : " But if I by
the finger (or, according to Matthew, by
the spirit) of God cast out devils, then
is the kingdom of God come upon you."
This " is come " {tydao-e) must mean some
thing more than the usual "is at hand"
(rjyyiKEv) ; it is the solemn declaration that
the kingdom is present in Jesus' acting ;
His casting out of devils proves that the
powers of the kingdom are at work.
Some interpreters take pleasure in urging
the discrepancy between these two argu
ments. When Jesus' casting out of
devils, they say, is nothing else than
what was done by the rabbis, how can it
be taken as a sign of the kingdom of
God being present ? Perhaps this is

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 127
logically correct ; it is hardly true psycho
logically ; you can easily compare one
thing with another without admitting that
both are on the same level. That the
casting out of devils by Jesus was far
beyond the usual exorcism of the rabbis
is admitted by His opponents by their
very attack. If, then, the kingdom of
God is proved to be present by the casting
out of devils by Jesus, we have here
a peculiar notion of the kingdom. There
was, as we have seen before, beside the
political notions of the kingdom of God,
another idea in Jewish eschatology, a
mythological one, taking the kingdom of
God in contrast to the power of Satan
and his evil spirits. This we have here ;
but the difference is that Jesus by His
deeds realises the idea. He Himself is
" the stronger," spoken of in that other
parable connected with our saying both

128 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
in Mark and Q, who, having first bound
the strong man, spoils his goods. The
individual act of casting out a devil is
only the consequence of what Jesus has
done before, overcoming Satan. So we
read in Luke x. 18, that when the seventy
returned with joy exulting that even the
devils were subject to them in Jesus'
name, Jesus answered them : " / beheld
Satan fallen as lightning from heaven."
I am not prepared to accept this as a
parallel to Revelation xii. 9, where the
dragon is cast out from heaven and comes
down to the earth in order to persecute
the Children of the Church.1 I understand
it as an allegory of Satan's power being
broken, so that it is easy work now to
cast out his evil spirits. For the disciples
* F. Spitta, "Satan als Blitz" in Preuschen's
ZNTW, ix., 1908, 160.

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 129
it is no matter of glorifying themselves on
account of their exorcising power ; they
had rather enjoy their own salvation.
2. A second saying to be studied in
this connexion is found in Luke xvii.
20-21 only: "And being asked by the
Pharisees, when the kingdom of God
cometh, he answered them and said: the
kingdom of God cometh not with observa
tion, neither shall they say, Lo, here!
or, There ! for Lo, the kingdom of God
is within you." So tvrbg vfia>v is trans
lated both by the A.V. and the R.V.,
while some interpreters prefer to trans
late in the midst of you.1 The discus-
1 The Latin intra vos seems to patronise this
later view : unter euch, among you : on Old
Syriac bainathchon {among you) and Pesitta
begau menchon (in the midst of you) and
Diatessaron within your heart, see F. C.
Burkitt, Evangelion da Mepharreshe, ii. 198,
Eschatology. 10

130 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
sion as to the true meaning of this ivrog
goes through the whole history of inter
pretation and will perhaps never come to
a final decision, most interpreters main
taining that there must be the same
notion of presence as in the former
saying. Joh. Weiss tries to get rid of
this notion by taking "is in the midst
of you" in the sense of "will then be
in the midst of you suddenly, without
being announced by outward visible pre
parations." But in order to express "in
the midst of you " Luke would have used
Ififiio-q ' ; the rather uncommon expression
Ivrbg vfiwv he can have chosen only
298. A. Merx, Die vier kanonischen Evangelien,
ii. 2, 347, understands the Pesitta meaning :
" within you." " Inside of you " is the Bohairic
rendering (G. Horner).
1 This is found in Luke's writings more than
a dozen times ; Ivtoq c. gen. only xvii. 21.

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 131
with the aim of giving to " in " the
peculiar colouring of inwardness.' Now it
may be an open question, if we can trust
his rendering of the Aramaic original.
There may have come in a misunder
standing in the very act of translation.
But we cannot reach this Aramaic original
behind the extant Greek text. And I see
no necessity for putting aside Luke's
meaning, as inwardness of the kingdom,
if not stated expressly by other sayings
of Jesus, is quite in the line of what he
says about clean and unclean : " There is

1 It is worth remark that the parallels
brought forward in favour of the meaning " in
the midst of you " are all taken from early
writers, as Thukydides, Plato, Xenophon,
whereas the LXX uses the word in the sense
of "in the interior of'.' I should attribute a
great value, too, to the linguistic sensorium
of Chrysostom, who champions the inward-view.

132 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
nothing from without the man, that going
into him can defile him : but the things
which proceed out of the man are those that
defile the man ; " "for from within, out of
the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed . . .
and defile the man" (Mark vii. 15, 21;
cp. Matt. xv. 11, 19). If it is man's
heart where the evil thoughts come from,
or, in other words, where the devil ex
ercises his dominion, then it is man's
heart, too, where the kingdom of God
is to be established. " Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done " points in the same
direction. 3. A third saying is still more difficult.
It is found in Matt. xi. 12, 13, and
Luke xvi. 16, i.e., at two different places,
and in two quite different forms, too. I
therefore do not think that it comes from
Q, but rather from some other source,
perhaps an oral one. We hardly can say

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 133
what are the original words ; we had
better put the two redactions side by
side : —

Matthew.
(a) And from the days
of John the Baptist until
now the kingdom of
heaven suffereth vio
lence, and men of vio
lence * take it by force.
(b) For all the pro
phets and the law pro
phesied until John.

Luke.
(a) The law and the
prophets (were) until
John :
(J?) from that time the
gospel of the kingdom
of God is preached, and
every man entereth vio
lently 2 into it.

Whatever may be the original form
(most of the interpreters trying to gain it
by a rather hazardous combination) ; 3

1 The violent, A.V. 2 Presseth, A.V.
3 See the various attempts at reconstruction
by Wendt, Lehre Jesu, i. 75 ; Harnack, SprUche
Jesu, 101 ; B. Weiss, Die Quellen der syn.

134 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
whatever may be the meaning of that most
disputed word /3-aorai and fiiaZerai (Luke,
evidently taking the latter in a passive
sense : is compelled to enter into it) : one
thing seems to be beyond any doubt : the
time of Jesus is set in opposition to the
time until John, the present to the past,
and it is to this present that the kingdom
of God belongs, not to a third form, the
future. And because it is present, it is to
be taken as something inward, some ex
perience of happiness which men try to
get so eagerly that they rather jostle one
another in the effort to reach it.
4. A fourth saying, which one would
mention in this connexion, is perhaps not
so certain ; it is found in Mark x. 1 5

Uberlieferung (Texte u. Unters., 3 ser. ii. 3);
H. von Soden, Die wichtigsten Fragen in Leben
Jesu, does not include this saying in Q.

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 135
(cp. Luke xviii. 17 ') : " Verily I say unto
you, Whosoever shall not receive the king
dom of God, as a little child, he shall in no
wise enter therein." While in the second
part the notion of the kingdom is the
usual one, a different notion seems to be
presupposed in the first part. If to receive
the kingdom is the condition for entering
into the kingdom, it must be in the first
place some kingdom before the kingdom,
i.e., some inward experience, accessible to
man in the present time, before the king
dom in the external eschatological sense is
to be revealed. The kingdom of God as
an experience of man's heart would be in
agreement with what we learned from
Luke xvii. 21. On the other hand, "the
kingdom of God" can be taken here as
1 Matthew omits this word at xix. 14, because
he has a various form of the same in xviii. 3.

136 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
an abbreviated expression for the "gospel
of the kingdom of God," and in this case
the conclusion would not be quite necessary.
5. Lastly, we have to mention here the
two parables of the mustard seed and the
leaven, only the former being given in
Mark iv. 30-32, while Luke xiii. 18-21,
following probably Q, has the original
couple, and Matthew xiii. 31-33 combines,
as he likes to do, the Marcan form with
the Q-tradition. The notion of the king
dom of God, given by these parables, is
at any rate quite opposite to the eschato
logical one which makes the kingdom
appear suddenly in its full power and
glory. Here we are told that it is grow
ing up, however quickly, and that it is
exercising influence by its inheritant power.
Certainly Jesus' opinion has nothing in
common with the modern view of a
gradual evolution, the seed of His gospel

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 137
coming to grow up by hundreds and
hundreds of years. He thinks of a rapid
growing up and a quick leavening of the
whole people by His gospel. But at all
events it is by His own preaching and
teaching and healing that the kingdom is
to be realised. We would not be sur
prised to hear Him speak of the great
success of His gospel, as He tells His
disciples in the parable of the sower that
what falls into good ground brings fruit,
some thirty and some sixty and some an
hundred (Mark iv. 8). But in these two
parables He is not speaking of His gospel,
but of the kingdom of God, illustrating its
extensive and intensive power. The con
clusion is inevitable, that it is by His
preaching that the kingdom comes, or,
rather, is present ; the effect of His
preaching is that inward experience of
man which we found identified with the

138 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
notion of the kingdom in two former
sayings. B. This peculiar notion of the kingdom
of God as some present, inward experi
ence is supported by a set of sayings
which show Jesus looking upon His own
present activity as means of — not so much
preparing, but bringing salvation to His
people. i. When the Baptist sends to Him ask
ing, "Art thou he that cometh, or look we
for another V (Luke vii. 19, Matt. xi. 3),
Jesus answers neither Yes nor No ; He
makes John glance over His activity and
see how it fulfils what the prophets had
said about the time of salvation. In what
ever sense you may take the words, " the
blind receive their sight," &c, spiritual or
realistic, Jesus' doings, His preaching, His
healing fulfil these expectations. The
Baptist, being a stern prophet of the last

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 139
judgment, had not done any miracle, as
we are informed John x. 41 ' : Jesus is
surrounded by miracles, the outward
miracles of healing being, in His own
opinion, only small proofs of the still
greater inward miracles of conversion of
sinners (Mark ii. 10 f). So Jesus' answer
to the Baptist is a Yes, but a Yes which
has to be made out by the asking man
himself: Look and see, and then you will
make up your mind that I am really He
that should come. Jesus, the humble Son
of Man, the preaching and healing prophet,
is indeed the Messiah. So He declares
to the people by telling them that John
the Baptist, the greatest of all prophets,
is far behind any one who belongs to the

1 The same is implied in the popular estima
tion of Jesus' relation to John, Mark vi. 14
(Matt. xiv. 2).

140 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
kingdom. He is not speaking of Himself,
but whoever has ears to hear may under
stand that He who speaks is more than
a small member of this kingdom : He is
the king in this kingdom.
2. And His disciples did understand
Him. At a time when the people still
looked out for various solutions of the
problem put before them by this Son of
Man, who was so unlike all others, who,
being the most humble and meek, yet
spoke with power as nobody ever had
spoken before Him ; at a time when
people called Him a prophet, one of the
great prophets of times past, Elijah, or
perhaps even John the Baptist himself,
risen from death, and, therefore, gifted
with miraculous power : — His disciples, by
the mouth of Peter, found the right ex
pression solemnly declaring Him to be the
Messiah, i.e., the unique, the final bringer

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 141
of salvation.' And He did not decline to
be called so ; He only forbade them to
tell this to the people, because He was
aware that such a claim would lead the
people to expect of Him what He never
intended to do, i.e., to relieve the people
from foreign tyranny, to deliver it from
the Romans, and may be, even from the
1 See Mark viii. 27 ff. ; Matt. xvi. 13 ff;
Luke ix. 18 ff. There is an ingenious interpre
tation of the Lukan form by Prof. F. Spitta
in his book Streitfragen der Geschichte Jesu, 1907,
85—843 : vpxiG oe riva /is Xeyere {Lvai . . . tov
Xpiarbv rou Oeoii, not being taken as the dis
ciples' personal confession, but as their speaking
to the people about Jesus (jttrjSevi \iyuv tovto,
ver. 21). Then the whole scene would have
another significance than we are accustomed
to ; Mark must have misunderstood this, and
Matthew reinforced this misinterpretation by
his well-known addition. I am not convinced
that this was Luke's meaning, nor that his
relation is independent of Mark.

142 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
Sadducees ; in one word, to carry on a
line of political evolution. This He de
clined, and therefore He not only forbad
His disciples to use the title of Messiah,
but He told them at once that He had
to be delivered into the hands of His
enemies and to be put to death — death,
however, not being able to destroy His
work or overcome Himself.
3. Jesus' activity was indeed a Messianic
one, if only we take this word not in its
national and political sense, but in the
purely religious meaning of bringing salva
tion and happiness. He said to His
disciples, according to Luke x. 23 and
Matt. xiii. 16: "Blessed are the eyes which
see the things which ye see, \and the ears
which hear the things which ye kear\ : ' for

1 This part is wanting in Luke, but it is
certainly original, as we have in Matt. :

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 143
/ say unto you that many prophets and
kings ' desired to see the things which ye see
and saw them not, and to hear the things
which ye hear and heard them not." We
can hardly imagine a more solemn form
of proclamation for the fact that in
Christ's present actions all promises are
fulfilled. And this is not the evangelists,
Luke or Matthew, but it is Q or some
other old source.
4. That in Jesus was fulfilled whatever
was expected for the Messianic time, will
further be seen by a comparison of several
sayings :
a. A commonplace of eschatological ex-
" Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your
ears, for they hear'' The parallelism is sup
ported also by the continuation.
1 The "righteous men" of Matthew is prob
ably his own ; he likes this combination,
cp. x. 41, xxiii. 29.

144 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
pectation was mutual hatred between the
nearest relations. So Mark xiii. 12 (cp.
Luke xxi. 16; Matt. x. 21, xxiv. 10)
records as a saying of Jesus that in the
last time brother shall deliver up brother
to death and the father his child, and
children shall rise up against parents,
and cause them to be put to death.
Now in Q we read nearly the same,
but it runs quite another way, Jesus
saying —

Luke xii. 51-53.
Think ye that I am
come to give peace in
the earth? I tell you,
Nay, but rather divi
sion : for there shall be
from henceforth five in
one house divided, three
against two, and two
against three. They

Matthew x. 34-35.
Think not that I
came to send peace on
the earth ; I came not
to send peace but a
sword. For I came to
set a man at variance
against his father, and
the daughter against
her mother, and the

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 145
shall be divided, father daughter-in-law against
against son and son her mother-in-law.
against the father, mo
ther against daughter
and daughter against
her mother ; mother-in-
law against her daugh
ter-in-law and daughter-
in-law against her mo
ther-in-law. Jesus is come to fulfil what was expected
for the last time. And Jesus Himself
realises some of this result of His mission
by the unbelief He met with in His own
family (Mark iii. 21, 31 ff. ; cp. Matt. xii.
46 ff., Luke viii. 19 ff., John vii. 5), and
on the part of his countrymen (Mark vi.
1-6 ; cp. Matt. xiii. 53-58, Luke iv. 16-30).
b. The Messianic judgment was to bring
up a sharp separation, as is said in a saying
recorded by Q itself : " Then shall two
men be in the field (or according to Luke :
Eschatology. 1 1

146 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
"In that night there shall be two men on
one bed), one is taken and one is left; two
women shall be grinding at the mill, one
is taken and one is left" (Matt. xxiv. 40, 41 ;
Luke xvii. 34). Now this very separation
is worked out by Jesus Himself when He
calls some fishermen to follow Him and
left others ; when He calls Levi and
Zacchaeus the publicans and the Pharisees
stand outside ; when He declines to allow
the one who asks to follow Him, whereas
He presses on another who is rather un
willing : "follow me ; and leave the dead to
bury their own dead" (Matt. viii. 22 ;
Luke ix. 60).
c. At the Messianic time a large festival
was expected, all members of the chosen
people taking part in it. Jesus, in His well-
known parables accepts this expectation
correcting only its last part. Those who
were first invited refusing to come, others

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 147
will be introduced (Luke xiv. 16-24 ; Matt.
xxii. 1-14) ; this is nearly the same as what
He says about the heathen taking a place
at the Messianic table together with the
patriarchs (Luke xiii. 28 ff. ; Matthew viii.
11 f.). But the same is fulfilled already in
Jesus' own lifetime by His preaching the
gospel of the kingdom to the poor, declaring
that the publicans and harlots go into the
kingdom of God before the Pharisees
(Matt. xxi. 31 f. ; cp. Luke vii. 29) ; it is
accomplished when He sits down with
publicans and sinners, so that the honour
able men who pretend to be alone worthy
of His company are rather shocked (Mark
ii. 15 f. c. par.) ; when he finds faith among
Gentiles in a measure He never had found
before among His own countrymen (Luke
vii. 9 ; Matt. viii. 10).
5. All this points to the same effect :
Jesus is the Messiah, whatever may be the

148 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
discrepancy between His appearance and
the popular expectation. He is the Messiah
in this sense, that He brings judgment and
salvation. He is the stumbling-block for
one class of men, and to the other He
brings happiness and joyous life. As He is
the son, so His disciples are the son, freed
from all bondship, so that they need not
even pay the regular tax for the temple,
a saying which, though found only in
Matthew xvii. 26, in a context belonging to
a not very trustworthy collection of Peter
stories, nevertheless has a genuine colouring.
Jesus as surrounded by His disciples re
presents the new era of Messianic time.
The wedding, a very common Messianic
notion, spoken of in so many parables of
Jesus, is already going on ; Jesus is the
bridegroom, His disciples are the children
of the bride-chamber, as He puts it in His
apology for non-fasting (Mark ii. 19, 20 ;

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 149
cp. Matt. ix. 15, Luke v. 34, 35). This is
all the more remarkable as we have it not
in Q as most of the words mentioned before,
but in that same Marcan tradition which we
found to be distinguished for its eschato
logical views.' Jesus looked upon His
estate as belonging already to the new
order of things. So in the parables of the
piece of new cloth and of the new wine
(combined in Mark ii. 21, 22, c. par. with

1 About the authenticity there can be no doubt
(against Wellhausen). The question rather is, if
those words belong to so early a period in the
life of Jesus (Wendt). As a matter of fact, Mark's
chronological arrangement is not beyond doubt ;
it was criticised already by the Elder from whom
Papias got his information. But having no means
of settling the chronological order by ourselves,
we had better refrain from expressing decision.
I am not persuaded that there was an
evolution in Jesus' thought during His public
ministry.

150 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
the parable of the bridegroom) He declares
as clearly as possible, that there is some
thing new about Him in opposition to all
that which was before. It is the same
contrast as we found it in the word Luke
xvi. 1 6, dealing with John the Baptist as
representative of the time gone and the
preaching of the kingdom as the characteristic
of the time now.
Here we may stop. The evidence col
lected is quite sufficient to prove that in the
teaching of Jesus there is a strong line of
what I would call transmuted eschatology.
I mean eschatology transmuted in the sense
that what was spoken of in Jewish
eschatology as to come in the last days is
taken here as already at hand in the lifetime
of Jesus ; transmuted at the same time in
the other sense that what was expected as
an external change is taken inwardly : not
all people seeing it, but Jesus' disciples be-

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 151
coming aware of it. For the great mass
of the people Jesus is only one of the
prophets ; for His enemies, Pharisees as
well as Sadducees, He is a pseudo-prophet
deceiving the people ; but His disciples
recognise and acknowledge Him to be the
Messiah, the Chosen one of God ; and in
His company they enjoy all the happiness
of the Messianic time.
Now we must compare this with the
first group of sayings dealing with pure
eschatology : Jesus the Messiah to come on
the clouds of heaven ; the Messianic judg
ment to be held at the end of the days ;
the Messianic meal to take place after this
glorious event, and so on. Both groups
are quite distinct and to be kept separate.
Neither of them may be reduced easily to
the other one without violence being done
to the tradition, nor can we put aside one
of them as a later addition or transformation,

152 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
both being attested by our best sources.
One may say that in Mark the eschato
logical view prevails, whereas the other
view is predominant in Q ; but Q is not
without eschatology, nor Mark without the
other element. This is the evidence of the
Gospel-tradition.

II
Before starting a solution of this problem,
we have to take account of one more
point of tradition, worth being remarked.
Taking together all materials collected
hitherto, eschatology as well as transmuted
eschatology, we find that they represent
only a small part of the whole Gospel-
tradition ; there are plenty of sayings
beside these, which we may call, for the
sake of brevity, entirely non-eschatological.
We do not need lose time with a detailed

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 153
investigation, Every one knows what
Jesus says about trust in God, God's care
for the individual, about prayer and the
certainty of its being heard, not trusting
in riches, loving the neighbour and even
the enemy, pardoning offenders, &c. It
is (as Harnack stated against Wellhausen)
the great value of Q that it represents
Jesus from this peculiar side. But even
in Mark we have plenty of this non-
eschatological, purely moral matter : e.g.,
Jesus' sayings about cleanness (vii. 1-23),
marriage and divorce (x. 1-12), children
(x. 13-16), and the rich (x. 17-31).
It may be interesting to settle this
statement by means of a peculiar inductive
investigation. There are the so-called doublets, i.e.,
sayings related both by Mark and Q.
They are of some importance in the
critical study of the Gospels, some critics

154 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
maintaining that they prove a literary
relation to exist between these two main
sources — I on the contrary, am rather
inclined to say that they prove both
sources to be independent, giving the
same saying mostly in quite different
renderings. But they have another im
portance, too, as Professor Burkitt has
pointed out ' : they allow us to infer
not only which sayings are the best
attested, but at the same time sayings
which were the most appreciated, and,
therefore, had the widest circulation and
the greatest influence. Now out of the
thirty doublets, which may be read in

1 The Gospel History and its Transmission,
1906, 147 ff. Cp. also Sir John Hawkins, Horae
Synopticae, 1899, 65 ff, and Professor V. H.
Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Documents, ii.,
I909. 59-60.

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 155
Professor Burkitt's book there are but
seven dealing with eschatology,1 all the
others containing non-eschatological matter
of a moral character. Of course the
eschatological background may give a
peculiar colouring to some of them ; e.g.,
that nothing is hid save that it should
be manifested, may, set by itself, well
be taken as an announcement of the last
judgment. But, in general, we should
not miss anything for the understanding
of those general moralisations, if we had
no knowledge of the eschatology of
Jesus. At this point we may be able to
pronounce a fair criticism of the so-called
theory of " consistent eschatology." Ac
cording to this theory there is nothing

1 Nos. 2, 3, 12, 15, 29, 30, 31 in Burkitt's
list.

156 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
in the life of Jesus nor in His sayings
which is not to be explained by eschato
logy, that is to say, by Jesus' belief that
He was to bring the end of this present
order of things. Now (i) this theory
is to be maintained only by doing violence
to the tradition, which, besides some
distinct eschatological matter, gives a few
but very expressive instances of what I
have called transmuted eschatology, and
as the main content a large amount of
non-eschatological matters. It means doing
violence to Jesus' moral teaching, if this
is subordinated to His announcement of
the approaching end in the way of being
only an " Interimsethik " ; it means doing
violence to the other group of sayings
representing the kingdom and the Messiah-
ship as present, if these are taken only
as mere anticipations of the future, to
be jumped over, while Jesus' real doctrine

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 157
is said to be represented only by the
first group of sayings, the purely eschato
logical group. (2) The surprising lights
this theory seems to throw upon several
points of the gospel history are gained
by a strange interpretation which reads
into the text what is to be demonstrated :
e.g., when the feeding of the multitude
as well as the last supper is taken as
a Messianic sacrament, assuring to all
partakers the participation at the Messianic
meal, it has to be admitted that there
is not the slightest indication thereof in
the texts, but even that probably no one
of all who were present was able to
conceive this meaning. (3) It is Jesus
Himself who contradicts this modern view
of His activity, viz., that He was working
by all His forces to the effect of bringing
about the kingdom of God or the end
of history ; in the parable of the seed

158 TWO MORE FEATURES IN THE
(Mark iv. 26-29) he expressly states that
when the seed has been cast into the
ground the man has nothing else to do
but to wait for the time of harvest.
It is not only the amount of non-
eschatological materials in the Gospels
that forbids us to account for Jesus' whole
life and teaching by His eschatology.
It is at the same time the permanent
value of His non-eschatological doctrines
that causes us to put them in the first
rank, whereas the transmuted eschatology
points out in what direction Jesus Himself
would form the mind of His believers.
It is, lastly, as we have said before,
the history of the Christian Church, from
its beginning in the apostolic age to our
own time, that proves the non-eschatological
element to be essential. This statement
does not include, however, the opposite
thesis, that eschatology has no place at

GENUINE JESUS-TRADITION 159
all in Jesus' mind. A sound and sober
interpretation will be found to be one
which gives to every group of sayings
its own value and weight.

Jesus
Various Modes of Understanding (St. John)

12

LECTURE IV
JESUS. VARIOUS MODES OF UNDER
STANDING (St. John).
/^\UR investigation of the Gospel-tra-
^— ' dition led us to the conclusion
that there are different lines of thought,
and various groups of sayings, which have
each of them the same claim to be ac
counted for, if we try to make out what
was Jesus' own opinion. We will do our
best to combine them in a way of a
psychological analysis of the leading ideas
in Jesus. Contrary to the order of our
former investigation, we will begin with
the third group of sayings, i.e., the non-
Eschatology. 163

164 JESUS
eschatological group, which we found to
cover the most space and to be of
the highest importance.
{a) Jesus, as it is commonly said,
started as a teacher of piety and morality.
So at least people understood Him. They
called Him a rabbi, remarking, however,
that there was something in Him far
above the doctrine of the rabbis of His
time. It has been proclaimed by many a
rationalistic writer of recent time, and
especially by modern Jewish authorities,
that Jesus was nothing but a reformer of
moral ideas, and that He did not go be
yond the line of the best moralists of His
time, such as, e.g., Rabbi Hillel. There
are coincidences, of course, for Hillel also
summed up the whole of the law in one
sentence, the so-called golden rule. But
we need only read attentively Jesus' ex
planation of the law as given in Matt. v.

JESUS 165
to see the difference, He expresses
not an individual opinion which may be
balanced by the authority of some other
rabbi — the way in which the rabbinical
schools of that time used to settle questions
concerning the law — but gives the explana
tion ; He fulfils the law, as it is said, by
setting finally the rule which is to guide
its interpretation. He even speaks with
no less authority than the law itself : " You
have heard that it was said to them of
old time: but I say unto you," and some
times He sets aside the letter of the law
by giving higher ordinances of His own,
as in the law of the Sabbath, the law of
purification, the law of divorce, &c.
There are others who consider Him
more than a rabbi, and are prepared to
acknowledge that His teaching is rather
to be compared with the teaching of the
great prophets of a former time, the pro-

166 JESUS
phets whose great work was to raise the
religion of Israel to a higher platform of
ethical conceptions. Jesus, it has been
said, overcame the rabbinical Judaism of
His time, with all its ritualistic and
legalistic moralities, by going back to the
simple and lofty standard of the old pro
phets. There is undoubtedly some truth
in this statement. We need only read
Mark vii. or x. to see how deeply Jesus'
mind was filled with prophetical sayings,
how He opposed Old Testament authority
to the traditional doctrine of the rabbis of
His time. But this touches only the form
of His utterances, and you will remark
that while the prophet is speaking in the
name of his God, Jesus sets His own
authority even against the Divine Law.
There is something more in His teaching
than a mere restoration of the old pro
phetical religion.

JESUS 167
In the last twenty years there has been
a great change as regards Jesus' teaching
— or rather, our view of religion has been
changed by rediscovering that morals, how
ever important in religion, are not the religion,
that there is a religion something beyond
all that is moral, intellectual, aesthetic, some
real intercourse with God. We may call
this mysticism, only that it is not neces
sarily mysticism in the strict sense of the
word with a naturalistic notion about Deity
as its basis and including some materia
listic means of intercourse with the Divine.
In Judaism, certainly, this element of
nature-religion had been cast away long
before, and it came into Christianity only
later through pagan influence. It marks
the position of Jesus in the history of re
ligion, that He is the culmination of that
line of religion' which has broken off all
relation to the primitive cult of nature

168 JESUS
and has put in its place the idea of God's
moral holiness, and that to do the will of
God makes the man religious. But, as we
have remarked already, to do the will of
God is not in itself the religion, but a part
of it, or, rather, a consequence of it. The
centre of religion is a real experience of
God's presence and helpfulness, of His
grace and mercy. And this is what we
find in complete fulness in Jesus. It is
only by taking account of this funda
mental part of Jesus' doctrine, that we can
hope to approach His own meaning as well
as His position in the history of mankind.
Jesus' teaching deals not so much with
morals, however important the moral
element of His teaching may be : He
preaches a new relation" of God to man
and of man to God ; or better, He brings,
He represents this new relation. And this
is, we may say confidently, what con-

JESUS 169
stitutes His distinction from, and His
superiority to all prophets. He has in
Himself the unity with God which He
brings to mankind. He does not only tell
how to realise a new form of relation to
God ; He embodies it in Himself.
{b) Now, without entering into the pro
found question of metaphysical speculation,
we may simply say that Jesus, according
to His own words, felt this relation to God
to be unique in Himself, and that He had
no other means of explaining it and speak
ing about it than by calling God His
Father and Himself God's Son. We may
be sure He supposed that the same rela
tion ought to exist between God and every
one else. But His refined moral sense
must have discovered at a very early
period of His life the difference be
tween Himself and others in this respect,
He Himself being in uninterrupted com-

170 JESUS
munion with His Father, while all others
were separated from God by sin. He felt
the longer, the more that it was His task
to bring them into full communion with
God. His life was to be devoted to this
very aim, to remove all that could stand
between God and mankind.
This is, I should think, the real meaning
of what we call Jesus' " Tauferlebnis," the
experience at the moment of His baptism :
He became aware of this as the task laid
upon Him by His Father's will. This, at
the same time, explains the story of the
temptation, that in taking upon Him that
task, He had to come to terms with the
ordinary Messianic notion of His people.
" Thou art My beloved Son, in Thee I am
well pleased." This Jesus had known all
His life ; but at this very moment it
gained a new significance for Him. He
was to be the Son of God, acknowledged

JESUS 171
as such by His people ; in other words,
He was to be the Messiah.1 Of course,
Jesus did not think of Himself as the
Messiah according to the current popular
notion ; this He declined, as we learn
from the story of the temptation. What
ever may be the kernel of this story, it
shows that it is a mistake, in order to get
at a solution of the problem, to start from
the current popular notion and ask how
Jesus could adopt this. The late Pro
fessor A. Merx (of Heidelberg) was quite
right in denying that Jesus ever thought
of adopting this.2 We have to go the
opposite way : we take it for granted that
Jesus had a peculiar estimation of His
own importance, what German theology
1 Cp. on this topic E. Schiirer, Das messianische
Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, Gottingen, 1903.
2 Die vier kanonischen Evangelien, ii. 1, 1902,
186 and passim.

172 JESUS
calls his " Selbstbewusstsein." Conscious as
He was of a unique position involving a
great task as well as a supreme authority,
He had no other notion in the language of
His people to describe this position than
that of Messiah. Rabbi was a common
title, expressing the human authority of
scholarship, a man of letters, a man who
studies and knows the law. Jesus was
no man of letters : He of course knew the
law, but not by scholarly training ; He
knew it as the will of His Father. He
was far above all that could be
meant by calling Him a rabbi. Nor
would prophet have been sufficient to ex
press His own self-appreciation ; there had
been prophets in great number : He knew
His position was unique ; the prophets had
all been talking about a time of fulfilment
to come : He was bringing this time.
They all derived their authority from a

JESUS 173
special calling, from individual acts of
inspiration : He did not need such call
ing ; His understanding of God His
Father was beyond all inspiration. So
to express His unique position there was
no other means than to adopt the title
of Messiah, and to express His task
there was no other way than to preach
the kingdom of God, because the
Messiah was to bring salvation, and the
kingdom of God was the most compre
hensive term for final salvation. Both
notions undoubtedly included at that time
many other things. So it has been said,
with some appearance of truth, that Jesus,
when adopting such terms in a sense
different from the current one, was bound
to give at the beginning of His teaching
a clear statement about His own under
standing of it. As He did not do so,
He must, we are told, have taken the

174 JESUS
notions in their current sense, and we are
bound to accept them in the realistic
meaning of late Jewish eschatology. I
do not think the presuppositions are right :
Jesus was not a philosopher proceeding
upon definitions and conclusions. He was
a preacher, or rather, His way was preach
ing. And we see Him going on slowly
in His declarations. He likes to make
men find out by themselves what He is.
You remember His answer to the Baptist.
He likes to put forth things in such a
way that they are clear for those who
are willing to understand, whereas others
may guess as they like. Mark is surely
not quite wrong in his statement regard
ing the parabolic form of Jesus' teaching
— parables including indeed, besides their
proper aim of illustrating, some element
of concealment. So it is easy enough to
explain how the Messiahship of Jesus

JESUS 175
came to be looked upon by His disciples
as a mystery not to be revealed to the
people. There is no necessity for accept
ing the ingenious, but rather too ingenious,
theory of the late Professor W. Wrede
(of Breslau),' who maintained this con
ception of a mystery to involve the
implicit confession that at a later time
two opposite views were combined, viz.,
an earlier view regarding Jesus as Messiah
only after His death and resurrection, and
a later one taking Him as Messiah already
in His lifetime.
As an example of Jesus' own way of
dealing with His Messiahship, let us take
His entrance into Jerusalem, which usually
is declared to be the most solemn form
of Messianic self-declaration. But where
is the Messianic element? To ride upon
1 Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901.

176 JESUS
an ass is a very common fashion, occurring
frequently in Talmudic narratives regard
ing celebrated rabbis. The devotion of
His adherents in breaking branches from
the trees and putting their garments in
the way, is not so extraordinary in eastern
lands as it may seem to western readers.
Even the shouting, " Hosanna ! Blessed
He who comes in the name of the Lord"
is not by itself a clear statement of
Messiahship, for Matthew, as a matter
of fact, says that the people declared
Jesus to be the prophet from Galilee
(xxi. ii). So His entrance was not
interpreted as a royal one, as a solemn
declaration of Messianic dignity. I quite
agree that Jesus Himself meant to enter
the capital of His people as the Messiah,
and that by riding on an ass He intended
to make allusion to the prophecy of
Zechariah ; but the manner He chose

JESUS 177
for His entrance was very fit for declaring
His Messianic dignity to those who were
able and inclined to understand and to
conceal it from the others. Whatever
one may think of this behaviour, I am
sure there is no other means of explaining
the tradition. Jesus goes His way in
the full consciousness of His unique
position ; but while others would have
spoken of their mission in the highest
terms, He only preaches the kingdom
of God, and chooses for Himself the
lowest of all Messianic titles — a title not
even regarded as involving Messiahship
by the mass of the people. He does His
work, and He leaves it to His Father
to reveal His Son to mankind. This He
tells us in that famous saying called
usually, according to Luke's introduction,
"the Agalliasis" (Luke x. 21, 22; Matt.
xi. 25, 27). Jesus is the Messiah. How-
Eschatology. 13

178 JESUS
ever slow may be the understanding of
His claim on the part of His disciples,
He is the Messiah from the very begin
ning of His public career, and not only,
as has been said recently,' from the time
of His transfiguration. This transfigura
tion has significance not for Himself but
for His disciples, the heavenly voice
being not a declaration on the part of
the Father to the Son, like that at the
baptism, " Thou art My beloved Son, in
whom I am well pleased," but rather a
declaration to the witnesses on behalf of
the Son, " This is My beloved Son : hear
ye Him" (Mark ix. 7).2
1 Harnack, SprUche Jesu, 138, n. 1.
2 Harnack (l.c. I722) is quite right insisting
upon the priority of the Sohnesbewusstsein com
pared with the Messias be wusstsein ; but these two
steps in the evolution of Jesus' self-conscious
ness correspond to the period before his public

JESUS 179
Jesus not only preaches the kingdom
of heaven, He brings it by casting out
devils and forgiving sins, by healing
diseases and filling men with a new spirit,
by spreading around Himself an atmo
sphere of happiness and salvation. Who
ever enjoys in company with Him His
complete communion with God, belongs
to the kingdom and gets all its
blessings. All this belongs to what we called the
transmuted eschatology ; this best ex
presses Jesus' proper view. The second
group of sayings, however small it may
be, is the most conspicuous: Jesus the
Messiah, i.e., the Saviour bringing actual
and present salvation to all those who
follow Him, salvation indeed in a purely
ministry and during it, not to two parts of His
public life.

180 JESUS
religious and moral sense, very different
from what people expected : " Blessed are
ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."
{c) There still remains the first group
of purely eschatological sayings, and we
have now to try to make out their signi
ficance for Jesus Himself and His dis
ciples. Thinking of Jesus as a teacher
of systematic theology, one would be
inclined to say : Granted that Jesus was
persuaded that He was the Messiah in
the true religious sense of the word
and brought salvation to His people,
there was no need of talking about
a future kingdom of God or of a
coming again in the clouds of heaven.
These are notions belonging to a former
stage of religious insight, and corrected
and overthrown by Jesus' own new views.
Transmuted eschatology makes eschatology
an unnecessary and even wrong suppo-

JESUS 181
sition. So one could argue; but I do
not think that this is right. Jesus, look
ing upon the misunderstanding and even
hatred with which He met, could not
think of His actual work as being the
final establishment of God's kingdom.
Jesus reading the Holy Scriptures could
not help acknowledging that the pro
phecies wanted some other fulfilment.
Being convinced that He was the Messiah,
and that He was bringing salvation to
His people and all mankind, He had to
look forward to a final success, and it was
only in the forms given by the prophets
of old and by the apocalyptic tradition
that He could imagine it. Being sure
that He represented in Himself the cul
mination of the religious history of His
people, He could only think of Himself,
trained as He was in Jewish views, as
standing at the end of history, at the

182 JESUS
meeting-point of the two ages. Thus
His coming back with the clouds of
heaven in the glory of the Father and
the holy angels must needs occur in a
very short time. This, I think, is the
way in which one may easily explain how
Jesus came to accept the eschatological
views of His time. Conservative as He
was, I think this was only natural for
Him (if we are allowed to apply psycho
logy to so exceptional a case). He did
but add eschatological expectation to His
conviction of being already in an eschato
logical relationship to the world, the term
being understood in the transmuted sense.
It was an inevitable consequence of His
trust in God His Father. God could not
leave His work undone or only half done.
He would certainly bring it to a plain
issue. He was bound to fulfil all His pro
mises. Salvation, as brought by Jesus, was

JESUS *83
only an individual and inward experience ;
it ought to be some collective and outward
fact. It is, as we have seen, characteristic
of Jesus' eschatological teaching, that He
makes no efforts to get a more detailed
view of eschatology ; He confines Himself
to repeating the outlines of what was
given by prophetic and apocalyptic tradi
tion, emphasising only two points, viz.,
the responsibility of men regarding the
coming judgment and that He Himself
is the Son of Man, who will pronounce
judgment. As He expressly says about
the time, that no one, not even the Son,
but only the Father knows it, so He
leaves to the Father also the form in
which all that is to be expected will be
fulfilled. He only expresses His own
opinion that it will happen soon, so that
men must be prepared, and that it will
be glorious, so that He Himself will be

184 JESUS
justified even in the eyes of His enemies,
who condemned Him to death.
If we take it in this fashion, we shall
easily come to a fair understanding. And
we shall, I think, discover at the same
time how to deal with the difficult ques
tion whether Jesus was misled in His
expectation. In fact, He did not come back in the
clouds of heaven in the lifetime of His
own generation. He has not come yet.
The history of the world did not come
to an end soon after mankind reached its
highest religious level in Jesus ; it has
continued through many centuries, going
up and down, mankind falling back to a
lower standard and climbing again, but
never reaching the height represented in
Jesus. So He was wrong in His expec
tation. Was He really? If we keep to
the letter of His words, we cannot help

JESUS 185
agreeing that He was wrong regarding
the outward form of His predictions, and
especially the time of God's fulfilment.
But this does not involve, I am sure,
any imperfection on His side, any more
than His opinion about the sun as a
star going around the earth, or about the
Pentateuch as a book written by Moses.
In all these respects He was a Jew of
His time. But as we have remarked
already, the form of His expectation was
unimportant even for Himself. He left
it to His Father how and when He
would realise it. His belief was that
His work and His own person could not
be overthrown, that His work, confined
as it was to a small circle, should gain
universal importance and undisputed
success, and that He Himself should be
acknowledged by every man as what He
was : the king of the kingdom of God.

186 JESUS. VARIOUS MODES
Now in this expectation He was not
wrong. His work has gone on through
His death and resurrection in a wonderful
way : the Church founded by His disciples
upon belief in His name, has spread
through the world, and will — so we hope
— gain the whole earth. He Himself is
acknowledged and adored as the Son of
God by millions and millions of believers.
Looking back through history, we may
see His work in the judgment upon His
nation, the Holy City being destroyed
and the nation scattered over the world.
So far Luke's interpretation is right ; only
it is the view of a later time looking upon
Jesus' prophecies in the light of a fulfil
ment, which even He Himself did not
imagine. We may truly say that it
pleased God to fulfil Jesus' words thus,
but we would be guilty of false witness
if we dared to maintain that Jesus

OF UNDERSTANDING 187
Himself expressed this as His own
opinion.

II
Beside this historical ex eventu interpre
tation, there is another, which is regarded
by many a pious Christian as the true
one. I mean the interpretation given to
the eschatological sayings in the Fourth
Gospel. I have avoided up till now
making use of this Gospel, the reason
for which will be seen presently. Our
research, however, would not be com
plete if we did not at least glance at it.
As a specimen I select two passages
dealing with Jesus' coming (xiv. 15-29),
and with the judgment (v. 19-29), two
notions of undoubted eschatological origin.
(a) It is rather hard to say what the
coming in chap. xiv. may be meant to

188 VARIOUS MODES OF
be. As the sayings concerning this idea
are placed now between other sayings
dealing with the coming of the Comforter,
one would feel inclined to say : it is
Jesus coming by His Spirit ; it is at
Pentecost that this promise was fulfilled.
But there is evidently some distinction
between the sending of the Comforter and
the coming of Jesus Himself. When we
compare chap. xvi. v. 16, "A little while,
and ye behold Me no more {ye shall not
see Me, A.V.), and again a little while,
and ye shall see Me," we feel compelled
to think of the appearances of the risen
Lord. And this would suit very well
the question of that other Judas (chap.
xiv. v. 22): "Lord, what is come to pass
that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us,
and not unto the world ? " The risen
Lord appeared, as has been remarked
from the earliest time, only to His

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 189
believers, and the Greek used here,
sfifaviZaiv eavrov, is a technical term for
appearances of healing gods who come to
visit these adherents in dreams. But let
us look more closely at the two verses,
xvi. 1 6 and xiv. 19, and it will appear
that there is a marked difference. The
former, "A little while, and ye behold
Me no more, and again a little while, and
ye see Me," has certainly to do with
death and resurrection. But the latter in
the passage before us, " Yet a little while,
and the world beholdeth Me no more, but
ye behold Me ; because I live, < and > ye
shall live also," runs quite differently. It
is the abiding communion of the Lord
with His disciples, unbroken even by
death, which finds here a splendid exposi
tion. That this is the true meaning will
be seen by the answer given to Judas :
"If a man love Me, he will keep My

190 VARIOUS MODES OF
word, and My Father will love him, and
We will come unto him and make our
abode with him." It is impossible not to
see that this means nothing else than an
inward dwelling of God and of the Lord
in the hearts of Christians, what we may
call mystical union, although St. John
understands it rather in an ethical than
in a mystical way. Even this idea of an
indwelling God can be traced back to an
eschatological conception, found in the
Old Testament prophets : God abiding in
the midst of His people, either in the
temple of His Holy City, or perhaps, as
it is put in the Christian apocalypse,
instead of the temple. There is no need
of sunlight, God Himself being in their
midst. But you will easily observe how
much this is altered. There is no more
eschatology ; its place has been taken by
mysticism ; the nation has given place to

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 191
the individual. Instead of dwelling in the
midst of His people, God is dwelling
inwardly in the hearts of the individual
believers. Now when we ask, Is this
Jesus or is it a Johannine conception,
one may at first sight be inclined to
think of it as a genuine utterance of the
Lord. It is very like what we have
called transmuted eschatology. I need
only remind you of our interpretation of
the word Ivroe ifiwv (Luke xvii. 21), which
we found to represent Jesus' own teach
ing, that the kingdom is " within you,"
i.e., something inward, an experience of
the heart, a rule governing man's will.
But — we must remark the very important
difference — it is the kingdom of God
which is here spoken of, not God or
Jesus ; it is a purely ethical inwardness,
expressed by these words, while there is
some mystical element in the words as

192 VARIOUS MODES OF
given by the Fourth Gospel, personal
union between God and man, Jesus and
man. And this is not an original view
of Jesus : it is, however, what we find
in St. John elsewhere. We need only
compare Revelation iii. 20 : " Behold, I
stand at the door and knock : if any man
hear My voice and oven the door, I will
come in to him, and will sup with him,
and he with Me." It is the well-known
eschatological notion of a Messianic
supper, where all the saints will be at
table with the Son of Man and the
patriarchs. Only it is not said here,
"He who hears My voice shall enter
into the wedding and sit down at My
table," but, " I will come in to him and
will sup with him." It is again an inward
and individual experience instead of an
outward and collective fact ; the eschato
logical picture is turned into some mystical

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 193
idea. Here we have the Johannine con
ception as we found it in the Gospel.
So I venture to say : The coming of the
Lord promised by Himself as an outward
eschatological act is changed into an
inward mystical experience by this Johan
nine colouring of His words. I quite
agree that there is some connexion with
one line of Jesus' thoughts. His concep
tion of the ethical inwardness of religion
reacted upon the eschatological ideas, and
out of this combination there arose what
we rightly may call the Johannine
mysticism. Only, in order to understand
this process thoroughly, we must re
member that it was not in Palestine but
in Asia Minor that St. John — whoever
he was — lived ; that he was surrounded
by a Hellenistic atmosphere ; and that
this, full of mysticism, helped to trans
form his Jewish conceptions. The ethical
Eschatology. 14

194 VARIOUS MODES OF
inwardness of Jesus and the mysticism of
Hellenistic religion had to co-operate in
order to produce this change of attitude.
So it happened that the idea of the
Parousia was turned into the idea of
Jesus coming into the hearts of His
believers. This interpretation, however, does not
account for the whole passage we are
dealing with. We do not reach the full
meaning of its content if we confine our
selves to this mystical colouring of the
original eschatological conception. There
is another element in it, which we may
call an historical adaptation : the coming
of Jesus is understood as meaning the
appearances of the risen Lord. This at
least is the meaning of some words in
these chapters, as we have seen before,
the promises of Jesus that He would come
again being interpreted from the experi-

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 195
ences of the earliest Christianity as ful
filled in the appearances of the risen
Lord. Another experience was the coming of
the Holy Ghost, and this led to the juxta
position of the sayings regarding the
Comforter with the sayings about Jesus'
own coming, with the result that the
latter may now be understood as identical
with the former.
So we may rightly distinguish a triple
stratification : (i) the underlying eschato
logical one, representing Jesus' own view ;
(2) the mystical one, which we may call
the main Johannine stratum ; and (3) a
twofold historical adaptation : Jesus' coming
is to be seen in His appearances or in
His sending the Comforter ; both these
adaptations may be attributed to a later
stage of Johannine thought, represented
by the author of the Fourth Gospel,

196 VARIOUS MODES OF
whom I believe to have been a pupil of
John the Presbyter, the Elder of Ephesus.
{b) The other passage which I choose
as an illustration is found in chap. v.
vv. 19-29. This passage deals with resur
rection and judgment, two notions which
undoubtedly belong to the eschatological
stock of late Jewish doctrines, and are
found in Jesus' teaching in their original
meaning. But here in the Fourth Gospel
we have them coloured almost to an
opposite meaning. Except the last two
verses, the passage in question deals en
tirely with the spiritual experiences of
Christianity. The judgment — or, as I
would prefer to translate, the discrimina
tion — between good and bad happens not
at the end of the world, but, as it is
said in chap. iii. vv. 18-21, when Jesus
preaches (or the gospel is preached) and
one man believes and the other refuses.

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 197
This is what the Fourth Gospel calls the
judgment, a self-going-on process, an auto
matic judgment upon the moral work of
men : those who do well will be attracted
by the light of the gospel, those who do
badly will withdraw from this light. And
so their fate will be decided without any
special judgment having to be pronounced
on the part of God. This is called 17 Kpi<ng,
the judgment (R.V.), or, as the Authorised
Version has it, the condemnation. So it is
said : "He that heareth My word, and
believeth Him that sent Me, hath eternal
life, and cometh not into judgment but
hath passed out of death into life" (or, is
passed from death unto life, A.V.). This
gives the old notion of resurrection, but
changed into something inward, so that
it reminds us of the teaching of the
Gnostics, as given by the Pastoral
Epistles, that the resurrection has already

198 VARIOUS MODES OF
taken place {avaaraoiv rjoij ysjovevaif 2 1 im.
ii. 1 8). This spiritualising tendency of
Johannine teaching is best seen in chap.
v. v. 25, " Verily, verily, I say unto you,
the hour cometh, and now is, when the
dead shall hear the voice of the Son of
God, and they that hear shall live." This
sounds purely eschatological, very like the
description of the great act of resurrec
tion as we find it e.g. in St. Paul's first
letter to the Thessalonians (iv. 16), "For
the Lord Himself shall descend from
heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the
archangel, and with the trump of God:
and the dead in Christ shall rise first."
But as it stands in John v. it cannot be
taken in this eschatological sense, but
only in a spiritual one : the dead are men
dead in their sin ; the voice of the Son
of God is the preaching of Jesus ; not all
are listening to it, only some hear it, i.e.

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 199
credit Him, believe in Him ; those who
believe gain life, not only a life of future
time, but life in the full sense of the
word, presently.
This meaning here is unmistakable.
But the Fourth Gospel does not stop
here ; it goes on supplementing the in
ward spiritual view by an outward escha
tological outlook, and thereby distinguish
ing Johannine theology from the doctrine
of Gnostic heretics. We read nearly the
same words again, only a few verses later
on, v. 28, 29, but now in a clear eschato
logical form: "Marvel not at this; for
the hour cometh, in which all that are
in the tombs shall hear His voice, and
shall come forth, they that have done good,
unto the resurrection of life, and they that
have done ill, unto the resurrection of
judgment" (or better, damnation, A.V.).
It is quite clear : these verses are dealing

200 VARIOUS MODES OF
with some future event — there is no word
about the hour being now, as in v. 25 ;
they speak of a general resurrection —
there is no distinction between those who
hear and those who do not hear ; they
indicate a bodily resurrection — "all that
are in the tombs" is not susceptible of a
spiritual interpretation as " the dead" of
v. 25. There are two different notions
of life expressed in these two verses :
inward, present, spiritual ; and external,
future, in one word, eschatological.
Chap. v. vv. 28, 29 gives indeed the
description of what is called in Revela
tion xx. 7-15 the second resurrection,
only that which precedes in v. 25 does
not correspond to the first resurrection in
Revelation xx. 1-6. It is not so much a
first and a second resurrection as a re
generation and then a resurrection. Of
course, vv. 28, 29, as they are put now,

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 201
are meant to be an explanatory repeti
tion, a corroboration and at the same
time an interpretation of v. 25. But taken
in their proper sense, they deal with two
quite different notions and originate in
different conceptions ; vv. 28, 29 give the
current popular eschatology in its realistic
form, which has been transmuted by
spiritualising in v. 25. The curious phe
nomenon here is that the transmuted
eschatology appears as the main line, the
underlying popular eschatology only as an
additional feature.
Now this "comes very near to what we
found in Jesus' own teaching : transmuted
eschatology with an additional element of
real eschatology ; it is, however, not
quite the same. There is a slight dif
ference which prevents us from tracing
back this Johannine tradition immediately
to Jesus Himself. He never speaks of

202 VARIOUS MODES OF
the judgment as some inward experience
of man : to Him it is some future event.
He often talks about entering into life,
but never as done by the very act of
believing in His word : to do so is a
privilege granted by God or His Messiah
in a future time. On the other side, the
idea of a bodily resurrection of all man
kind on the day of judgment, so common
in late Jewish literature and not un
common even in the Synoptic Gospels,
belongs rather to that stratum of later
eschatological additions which we recog
nised there in our first lecture.
Here we may stop our inquiry into the
Johannine branch of Gospel - tradition.
The two illustrations I ventured to give
will be sufficient, I trust, to show the
complicated nature of Johannine doctrines,
and what I think to be the right way of

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 203
dealing with them. There are different
stratifications, as modern research (Wendt,
Spitta, Bacon, Wellhausen, Ed. Schwartz) has
made more and more conspicuous.1 Beside
some genuine sayings of the Lord, we
have what may be called the Johannine
tradition, resting largely upon original con
ceptions of Jesus, but transforming them
in the direction of mysticism ; and then
we have some additional matter, in our
case the real eschatology, which perhaps
may be traced back to the author of the
Fourth Gospel, as distinguished from St.
John ; it is, however, possible that it
belongs to a later redaction, of which
chap. xxi. gives ample proof.
The main Johannine stratum, with its
characteristics of individualistic, ethical,
inward transformation of the current
Jewish eschatology, bears signs of close
1 Cp. H. L. Jackson, The Fourth Gospel, 1908.

204 VARIOUS MODES OF
affinity to the gospel of Jesus ; but at the
same time there is a marked difference :
the Johannine doctrine has a distinct
touch of mysticism, which is entirely
wanting in the teaching of Jesus, and is
to be explained by Hellenistic influences.
The validity of this distinction being
granted, we may, without fear of mis
understanding, declare that we take the
Johannine doctrine as an approximately
good expression of Jesus' own views.
The mystical inwardness of St. John
certainly approaches far more nearly to
Jesus' real meaning than the enlarging
and enforcing of His eschatological utter
ances which we remarked in some pas
sages of the Synoptic Gospels, especially
St. Matthew. However strong Jesus'
belief in eschatology might have been, it
was only of secondary importance for His
religious life, and for His teaching. It

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 205
was a misunderstanding on the part of
primitive Christianity when they laid the
greatest stress on this side of the gospel.
It may be called even a sign of decline
that the expectation of some outward,
realistic event overgrew the joyful ex
perience of inward, present salvation.
Later Christianity, when following the
Johannine line of thought, came nearer to
the true intention of Jesus Himself, not
withstanding His own belief in realistic
eschatology. Christianity is — and will ever be — the
religion of sure salvation, brought by
Jesus and to be experienced by His
believers already during their present life.
This does not exclude Christian hope.
On the contrary, the more present salva
tion is experienced in mankind, the
stronger Christian hope will be. This is
the great lesson given to us by Jesus

206 VARIOUS MODES OF
Himself ; He realised in Himself the
complete and supreme communion with
God, and yet He looked forward to a
time of final salvation. He was the Son
of God, and He had to bring salvation ;
but His gospel reached only few, and only
individuals realised what was given to
them in Jesus ! However fully they sub
mitted their own will to God, there were
powers of evil outside them. The
kingdom of God is not established so
long as its dominion is only recognised
by individuals ; it wants to be collective,
universal. Jesus' victory over Satan, His
casting out of devils, was only an
anticipation. And this is the abiding truth in
eschatology : it is to be sought not in the
particulars of Jesus' coming and similar
details, but in the fact that we have to
expect and to pray for a state of things

UNDERSTANDING (ST. JOHN) 207
in which God's dominion will be fully
established, and all obstacles, all evil
energies finally destroyed.' We have
seen in St. John's Gospel — and the later
history of Christianity affords plenty of
similar examples — that this looking out
for some external real change is well
combined with the finest and best inward
ness. The Christian is a new creature,
but he looks for a new heaven and a new
earth, and his prayer will be for ever as
His Lord taught him : " Thy kingdom
come." 1 Cp. Dr. Kolbing (formerly Principal of the
Moravian Seminary at Gnadenfeld) : Die bleibende
Bedeutung der urchristlichen Eschatologie, 1907.

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