words "death" and "life" in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God, not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original collection of Logia "with extreme literality."
The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is, according to Kirchbach, merely "a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His inborn love of His native land."
The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real teaching of Epicurus, "that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics, and the resulting condition of blessedness, of makaria." The only purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him. "If the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge, 'Right gladly. It will not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to have it why then I can do without it,' the Rabbi would probably in that case not have taken him at his word, but would have said, 'Young man, I like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.'"
Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi. "It is not the body," he explains, "of the long departed thinker, who apparently attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense, 'eat'; in the sense which He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching, His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the symbol of water." [1]
Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the
- ↑ Before him, Hugo Deiff, in his History of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth (Leipzig, 1889, 428 pp.), had confined himself to the Fourth Gospel, and even within that Gospel he drew some critical distinctions. His Jesus at first conceals His Messiahship from the fear of arousing the political expectations of the people, and speaks to them of the Son of Man in the third person. At His second visit to Jerusalem He breaks with the rulers, is subsequently compelled, in consequence of the conflict over the Sabbath, to leave Galilee, and then gives up His own people and turns to the heathen. Deiff explains the raising of Lazarus by supposing him to have been buried in a state of trance.
