historical fact. For instance, he thinks it unlikely that Peter was the only one to smite with the sword; so the history is immediately rectified by the phrase "that sword-stroke was doubtless not the only one, other disciples also must have pressed to the front." That Jesus was first condemned by the Sanhedrin at a night-sitting, and that Pilate in the morning confirmed the sentence, seems to him on various grounds impossible. It is therefore decided that we have here to do only with a combination devised by "a Christian from among the Gentiles." In this way the "must have been's" and "may have been's" exercise a veritable reign of terror throughout the book.
Yet that does not prevent the general contribution of the book to criticism from being a very remarkable one. Especially in regard to the trial of Jesus, it brings to light a whole series of previously unsuspected problems. Brandt is the first writer since Bauer who dares to assert that it is an historical absurdity to suppose that Pilate, when the people demanded from him the condemnation of Jesus, answered: "No, but I will release you another instead of Him."
As his starting-point he takes the complete contrast between the Johannine and Synoptic traditions, and the inherent impossibility of the former is proved in detail. The Synoptic tradition goes back to Mark alone. His Gospel is, as was also held by Bruno Bauer, and afterwards by Wrede, a sufficient basis for the whole tradition. But this Gospel is not a purely historical source, it is also, and in a very much larger degree, poetic invention. Of the real history of Jesus but little is preserved in the Gospels. Many of the so-called sayings of the Lord are certainly to be pronounced spurious, a few are probably to be recognised as genuine. But the theory of the "poetic invention" of the earliest Evangelist is not consistently carried out, because Brandt does not take as his criterion, as Wrede did later, a definite principle on which Mark is supposed to have constructed his Gospel, but decides each case separately. Consequently the most important feature of the work lies in the examination of detail.
Jesus died and was believed to have risen again: this is the only absolutely certain information that we have regarding His "Life." And accordingly this is the crucial instance for testing the worth of the Gospel tradition. It is only on the basis of an elaborate criticism of the account of the suffering and resurrection of Jesus that Brandt undertakes to give a sketch of the life of Jesus as it really was.
What was, then, so far as appears from His life, Jesus' attitude towards eschatology? It was, according to Brandt, a self-contradictory attitude. "He believed in the near approach of the Kingdom of God, and yet as though its time were still far distant,
