investigating the connecting principle of the life of Jesus, simply leave eschatology out of account? The blame rests with the eschatological school itself, for it applied the eschatological explanation only to the preaching of Jesus, and not even to the whole of this, but only to the Messianic secret, instead of using it also to throw light upon the whole public work of Jesus, the connexion and want of connexion between the events. It reprensented Jesus as thinking and speaking eschatologically in some of the most important passages of His teaching, but for the rest gave as uneschatological a presentation of His life as modern historical theology had done. The teaching of Jesus and the history of Jesus were set in different keys. Instead of destroying the modern-historical scheme of the life of Jesus, or subjecting it to a rigorous examination, and thereby undertaking the performance of a highly valuable service to criticism, the eschatological theory confined itself within the limits of New Testament Theology, and left it to Wrede to reveal one after another by a laborious purely critical method the difficulties which from its point of view it might have grasped historically at a single glance. It inevitably follows that Wrede is unjust to Johannes Weiss and Johannes Weiss towards Wrede. [1]
It is quite inexplicable that the eschatological school, with its clear perception of the eschatological element in the preaching of the Kingdom of God, did not also hit upon the thought of the "dogmatic" element in the history of Jesus. Eschatology is simply "dogmatic history"-history as moulded by theological beliefs-which breaks in upon the natural course of history and abrogates it. Is it not even a priori the only conceivable view that the conduct of one who looked forward to His Messianic "Parousia" in the near future should be determined, not by the natural course of events, but by that expectation? The chaotic confusion of the narratives ought to have suggested the thought that the events had been thrown into this confusion by the volcanic force of an incalculable personality, not by some kind of carelessness or freak of the tradition.
- ↑ That the eschatological school showed a certain timidity in drawing the consequences of its recognition of the character of the preaching of Jesus and examining the tradition from the eschatological standpoint can be seen from Johannes Weiss's work, "The Earliest Gospel" (Das alteste Evangelium), Gottingen, 1903, 414 pp. Ingenious and interesting as this work is in detail, one is surprised to find the author of the "Preaching of Jesus" here endeavouring to distinguish between Mark and "Ur-Markus," to point to examples of Pauline influence, to exhibit clearly the "tendencies" which guided, respectively, the original Evangelist and the redactor-all this as if he did not possess in his eschatological view of the preaching of Jesus a dominant conception which gives him a clue to quite a different psychology from that which he actually applies. Against Wrede he brings forward many arguments which are worthy of attention, but he can hardly be said to have refuted him, because it is impossible for Weiss to treat the question in the exact form in which it was raised by Wrede.
