completed His development at the time of His appearance; the Jesus of the new interpretation of Mark continues to develop in the course of His public ministry.
There is complete agreement, however, in the rejection of eschatology. Fpr Holtzmann, Schenkel, and Weizsacker, as for Weisse, Jesus desires "to found an inward kingdom of repentance."[1] It was Israel's duty, according to Schenkel, to believe in the presence of the Kingdom which Jesus proclaimed. John the Baptist was unable to believe in it, and it was for this reason that Jesus censured him-for it is in this sense that Schenkel understands the saying about the greatest among those born of women who is nevertheless the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. "So near the light and yet shutting his eyes to its beams-is there not some blame here, an undeniable lack of spiritual and moral receptivity?"
Jesus makes Messianic claims only in a spiritual sense. He does not grasp at super-human glory; it is His purpose to bear the sin of the whole people, and He undergoes baptism "as a humble member of the national community."
His whole teaching consists, when once He Himself has attained to clear consciousness of His vocation, in a constant struggle to root out from the hearts of His disciples their theocratic hopes and to effect a transformation of their traditional Messianic ideas. When, on Simon's hailing Him as the Messiah, He declares that flesh and blood has not revealed it to him, He means, according to Schenkel, "that Simon has at this moment overcome the false Messianic ideas, and has recognised in Him the ethical and spiritual deliverer of Israel."
"That Jesus predicted a personal, bodily, Second Coming in the brightness of His heavenly splendour and surrounded by the heavenly hosts, to establish an earthly kingdom, is not only not proved, it is absolutely impossible." His purpose is to establish a community of which His disciples are to be the foundation, and by means of this community to bring about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He can, therefore only have spoken of His return as an impersonal return in the Spirit. The later exponents of the Marcan view were no doubt generally inclined to regard the return as personal and corporeal. For Schenkel however, it is historically certain that the real meaning of the eschatological
- ↑ "Ein innerliches Reich der Sinnesanderung." "Sinnesanderung" corresponds more exactly than "repentance" to the Greek metanoia (change of mind, change of attitude), but the phrase is no less elliptical in German than in English. The meaning is doubtless "kingdom based upon repentance, consisting of those who have fulfilled this condition."
