therein lies at once its greatness and its weakness. Bousset vindicates Jesus, not for history, but for Protestantism, by making Him the heroic representative of a deeply religious acceptance of the goods of life amid an apocalyptic world. His study is not unhistorical, but supra-historical. The spirit of Jesus was in fact world-accepting in the sense that through the experience of centuries it advanced historically to the acceptance of the world, since nothing can appear phenomenally which is not in some sense ideally present from the first. But the teaching of the historical Jesus was purely and exclusively world-renouncing. If, therefore, the problem which Bousset has put on the blackboard for the eschatological school to solve is to be successfully solved, the solution is to be sought on other, more objectively historical, lines.
That the decision of the question whether Jesus' preaching of the Kingdom of God is wholly eschatological or only partly eschatological, is primarily to be sought in His ethical teaching, is recognised by all the critics of Baldensperger and Weiss. They differ only in the importance which they assign to eschatology. But no other writer has grasped the problem as clearly as Bousset.
The Parisian Ehrhardt emphasises eschatology very strongly in his work "The Fundamental Character of the Preaching of Jesus in Relation to the Messianic Hopes of His People and His own Messianic Consciousness."[1] Nevertheless he asserts the presence of a twofold ethic in Jesus' teaching: eschatology did not attempt to evacuate everything else of all value, but allowed the natural and ethical goods of this world to hold their place, as belonging to a world of thought which resisted its encroachments.
A much more negative attitude is taken up by Albert Reville in his Jesus de Nazareth [2] According to him both Apocalyptic and Messianism are foreign bodies in the teaching of Jesus which have been forced into it by the pressure of contemporary thought. Jesus would never of His own motion have taken up the role of Messiah.
Wendt, too, in the second edition of his Lehre Jesu, which appeared in 1903, held in the main to the fundamental idea of the first, the 1890, edition; namely, that Jesus in view of His purely religious relation to God could not do otherwise than transform, from within outwards, the traditional conceptions, even though
- ↑ Der Grundcharakter der Ethik Jesu im Verhaltnis zu den messianischen Hoffnungen seines Volkes und zu, seinem eigenen Messiasbewusstsein. Freiburg, 1895, 119 pp. See also his inaugural dissertation of 1896, Le Principe de la morale d Jesu. Paris, 1896. A. K. Rogers, The Life and Teachings of Jesus; a Critical Analysis, etc. (London and New York, 1894), regards Jesus' teaching as purely ethical, refusing to adnut any eschatology at all.
- ↑ Paris. 2 vols., 500 and 512 pp.
