forth of the disciples' and reflect instead the lurid gloom of the fierce conflicts of the later period and the sadness of the farewell discourses."
It was a good thing that Bruno Bauer did not hear this chorus. If he had, he would have asked Weiffenbach and his allies whether the poor fragment that remained after the critical dissection of the "charge to the Twelve" was "a discourse of instruction," and if in view of these difficulties they could not realise why he had refused, thirty years before, to believe in the "discourse of instruction." But Bruno Bauer heard nothing; and so their blissful unconsciousness lasted for nearly a generation longer.
The expectation of His Second Coming, repeatedly expressed by Jesus towards the close of His life, is on this hypothesis authentic; it was painted over by the primitive Christian community with the colours of its own eschatology, in consequence of the delay of the Parousia; and in view of the mission to the Gentiles a more cautious conception of the nearness of the time commended itself; nay, when Jerusalem had fallen and the "signs of the end" which had been supposed to be discovered in the horrors of the years 68 and 69 had passed without result, the return of Jesus was relegated to a distant future by the aid of the doctrine that the Gospel must first be preached to all the heathen. Thus the Parousia, which according to the Jewish-Christian eschatology belonged to the present age, was transferred to the future. "With this combination and making coincident-they were not so at the first-of the Second Coming, the end of the world, and the final Judgment, the idea of the Second Coming reached the last and highest stage of its development."
Weiffenbach's view, as we have seen, empties Jesus' expectation of His return of almost all its content, and to that is due the fact that his investigation did not prove so useful as it might have done. His purpose is, following suggestions thrown out by Schleiermacher and Wiesse, to prove the identity of the predictions of the Second Coming and of the Resurrection, and he takes as his starting-point the observation that the conduct of the disciples after the death of Jesus forbids us to suppose that the Resurrection had been predicted in clear and unambiguous sayings, and that, on the other hand, the announcement of the Second Coming coincides in point of time with the predictions of the Resurrection, and the predictions buih of the Second Coming and of the Resurrection stand in organic connexion with the announcement of His approaching death. The two are therefore identical.
It was only after the death of their Master that the disciples differentiated the thought of the Resurrection from that of the Second Coming. The Resurrection did not bring them that which the Second Coming had promised; but it produced the result that the eschatological hopes, ^hich Jesus had with difficulty succeeded
