XVI
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ESCHATOLOGY
Wilhelm Bousset. Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum. Ein religions-geschichtlicher Vergleich. (The Antithesis between Jesus' Preaching and Judaism. A Religious-Historical Comparison.) Gottingen, 1892. 130 pp.
Erich Haupt. Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien. (The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.) 1895. 167 pp.
Paul Wernle. Die Anfange unserer Religion. Tubingen-Leipzig, 1901; 2nd ed., 1904. 410 pp.
Emil Schurer. Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu-Christi. 1903. Akademische Festrede. (The Messianic Self-consciousness of Jesus Christ.) 24 pp.
Wilhelm Brandt. Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des Christentums auf Grund einer Kritik der Berichte iiber das Leiden und die Auferstehung Jesu. (The Gospel History and the Origin of Christianity. Based upon a Critical Study of the Narratives of the Sufferings and Resurrection of Jesus.) Leipzig, 1893. 591 pp.
Adolf Julicher. Die Gleichnisreden Jesu. (The Parables of Jesus.) Vol. i., 1888, 291 pp.; vol. ii., 1899, 643 pp.
IN THIS PERIOD THE IMPORTANT BOOKS ARE SHORT. THE SIXTY-SEVEN pages of Johannes Weiss are answered by Bousset [1] in a bare hundred and thirty. People began to see that the elaborate Lives of Jesus which had hitherto held the field, and enjoyed an immortality of revised editions, only masked the fact that the study of the subject was at a standstill; and that the tedious rehandling of problems which had been solved so far as they were capable of solution only served as an excuse for not grappling with those which still remained unsolved.
This conviction is expressed by Bousset at the beginning of his work. The criticism of the sources, he says, is finished, and its results may be regarded, so far as the Life of Jesus is concerned, as provisionally complete. The separation between John and the Synoptists has been secured. For the Synoptists, the two-document hypothesis has been established, according to which the sources are a primitive form of Mark, and a collection of "logia." A certain interest might still attach to the attempt to arrive at the primitive kernel of Mark; but the attempt has a priori so little
- ↑ Wilhelm Bousset, now Professor in Gottingen, born 1865 at Liibeck.
