Paul de Régla. Jesus von Nazareth. German by A. Just. Leipzig, 1894. 435 pp.
Ernest Bosc. La Vie ésotérique de Jésus de Nazareth et les origines orientales du christianisme. (The secret Life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Oriental Origins of Christianity.) Paris, 1902.
The ideal Life of Jesus of the close of the nineteenth century is the Life which Heinrich Julius Holtzmann did not write—but which can be pieced together from his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels and his New Testament Theology.[224] It is ideal because, for one thing, it is unwritten, and arises only in the idea of the reader by the aid of his own imagination, and, for another, because it is traced only in the most general outline. What Holtzmann gives us is a sketch of the public ministry, a critical examination of details, and a full account of the teaching of Jesus. He provides, therefore, the plan and the prepared building material, so that any one can carry out the construction in his own way and on his own responsibility. The cement and the mortar are not provided by Holtzmann; every one must decide for himself how he will combine the teaching and the life, and arrange the details within each.
We may recall the fact that Weisse, too, the other founder of the Marcan hypothesis, avoided writing a Life of Jesus, because the difficulty of fitting the details into the ground-plan appeared to him so great, not to say insuperable. It is just this modesty which constitutes his greatness and Holtzmann's. Thus the Marcan hypothesis ends, as it had begun, with a certain historical scepticism.[225]
The subordinates, it is true, do not allow themselves to be disturbed by the change of attitude at head-quarters. They keep busily at work. That is their right, and therein consists their significance. By keeping on trying to take the positions, and constantly failing, they furnish a practical proof that the plan of operations worked out by the general staff is not capable of being carried out, and show why it is so, and what kind of new tactics will have to be evolved.
The credit of having written a life of Christ which is strictly scientific, in its own way very remarkable, and yet foredoomed to failure, belongs to Oskar Holtzmann.[226] He has complete confidence in the Marcan plan, and makes it his task to fit all the sayings of Jesus into this framework, to show “what can belong to each period of the preaching of Jesus, and what cannot.” His method is to give free play to the magnetic power of the most important passages in the Marcan text, making other sayings of similar import detach themselves from their present connexion and come and group themselves round the main passages.
For example, the controversy with the scribes at Jerusalem regarding the charge of doing miracles by the help of Satan (Mark iii. 22-30) belongs, according to Holtzmann, as regards content and chronology, to the same period as the controversy, in Mark vii., about the ordinances of men which results in Jesus being “obliged to take to flight”; the woes pronounced upon Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, which now follow on the eulogy upon the Baptist (Matt. xi. 21-23), and are accordingly represented as having been spoken at the time of the sending forth of the Twelve, are drawn by the same kind of magnetic force into the neighbourhood of Mark vii., and “express very clearly the attitude of Jesus at the time of His withdrawal from the scene of His earlier ministry.” The saying in Matt. vii. 6 about not giving that which is holy to the dogs or casting pearls before swine, does not belong to the Sermon on the Mount, but to the time when Jesus, after Caesarea Philippi, forbids the disciples to reveal the secret of His Messiahship to the multitude; Jesus' action in cursing the fig-tree so that it should henceforth bring no fruit to its owner, who was perhaps a poor man, is to be brought into relation with the words spoken on the evening before, with reference to the lavish expenditure involved in His anointing, “The poor ye have always with you,” the point being that Jesus now, “in the clear consciousness of His approaching death, feels His own worth,” and dismisses “the contingency of even the poor having to lose something for His sake” with the words “it does not matter.”[227]
All these transpositions and new connexions mean, it is clear, a great deal of internal and external violence to the text.
A further service rendered by this very thorough work of Oskar Holtzmann's, is that of showing how much reading between the lines is necessary in order to construct a Life of Jesus on the basis of the Marcan hypothesis in its modern interpretation. It is thus, for instance, that the author must have acquired the knowledge that the controversy about the ordinances of purification in Mark vii. forced the people “to choose between the old and the new religion”—in which case it is no wonder that many “turned back from following Jesus.”
Where are we told that there was any question of an old and a new “religion”? The disciples certainly did not think of things in this way, as is shown by their conduct at the time of His death [pg 297] and the discourses of Peter in Acts. Where do we read that the people turned away from Jesus? In Mark vii. 17 and 24 all that is said is, that Jesus left the people, and in Mark vii. 33 the same multitude is still assembled when Jesus returns from the “banishment” into which Holtzmann relegates Him.