Oskar Holtzmann declares that we cannot tell what was the size of the following which accompanied Jesus in His journey northwards, and is inclined to assume that others besides the Twelve shared His exile. The Evangelists, however, say clearly that it was only the μαθηταί, that is, the Twelve, who were with Him. The value which this special knowledge, independent of the text, has for the author, becomes evident a little farther on. After Peter's confession Jesus calls the “multitude” to Him (Mark viii. 34) and speaks to them of His sufferings and of taking up the cross and following Him. This “multitude” Holtzmann wants to make “the whole company of Jesus' followers,” “to which belonged, not only the Twelve whom Jesus had formerly sent out to preach, but many others also.” The knowledge drawn from outside the text is therefore required to solve a difficulty in the text.
But how did His companions in exile, the remnant of the previous multitude, themselves become a multitude, the same multitude as before? Would it not be better to admit that we do not know how, in a Gentile country, a multitude could suddenly rise out of the ground as it were, continue with Him until Mark ix. 30, and then disappear into the earth as suddenly as they came, leaving Him to pursue His journey towards Galilee and Jerusalem alone?
Another thing which Oskar Holtzmann knows is that it required a good deal of courage for Peter to hail Jesus as Messiah, since the “exile wandering about with his small following in a Gentile country” answered “so badly to the general picture which people had formed of the coming of the Messiah.” He knows too, that in the moment of Peter's confession, “Christianity was complete” in the sense that “a community separate from Judaism and centring about a new ideal, then arose.” This “community” frequently appears from this point onwards. There is nothing about it in the narratives, which know only the Twelve and the people.
Oskar Holtzmann's knowledge even extends to dialogues which are not reported in the Gospels. After the incident at Caesarea Philippi, the minds of the disciples were, according to him, preoccupied by two questions. “How did Jesus know that He was the Messiah?” and “What will be the future fate of this Messiah?” The Lord answered both questions. He spoke to them of His baptism, and “doubtless in close connexion with that” He told them the story of His temptation, during which He had laid down the lines which He was determined to follow as Messiah.
Of the transfiguration, Oskar Holtzmann can state with confidence, “that it merely represents the inner experience of the disciples at the moment of Peter's confession.” How is it then that Mark expressly dates that scene, placing it (ix. 2) six days after the discourse of Jesus about taking up the cross and following Him? The fact is that the time-indications of the text are treated as non-existent whenever the Marcan hypothesis requires an order determined by inner connexion. The statement of Luke that the transfiguration took place eight days after, is dismissed in the remark “the motive of this indication of time is doubtless to be found in the use of the Gospel narratives for reading in public worship; the idea was that the section about the transfiguration should be read on the Sunday following that on which the confession of Peter formed the lesson.” Where did Oskar Holtzmann suddenly discover this information about the order of the “Sunday lessons” at the time when Luke's Gospel was written?
It was doubtless from the same private source of information that the author derived his knowledge regarding the gradual development of the thought of the Passion in the consciousness of Jesus. “After the confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi,” he explains, “Jesus' death became for Him only the necessary point of transition to the glory beyond. In the discourse of Jesus to which the request of Salome gave occasion, the death of Jesus already appears as the means of saving many from death, because His death makes possible the coming of the Kingdom of God. At the institution of the Supper, Jesus regards His imminent death as the meritorious deed by which the blessings of the New Covenant, the forgiveness of sins and victory over sin, are permanently secured to His ‘community.’ We see Jesus constantly becoming more and more at home with the idea of His death and constantly giving it a deeper interpretation.”
Any one who is less skilled in reading the thoughts of Jesus, and more simple and natural in his reading of the text of Mark, cannot fail to observe that Jesus speaks in Mark x. 45 of His death as an expiation, not as a means of saving others from death, and that at the Lord's Supper there was no reference to His “community,” but only to the inexplicable “many,” which is also the word in Mark x. 45. We ought to admit freely that we do not know what the thoughts of Jesus about His death were at the time of the first prediction of the Passion after Peter's confession; and to be on our guard against the “original sin” of theology, that of exalting the argument from silence, when it happens to be useful, to the rank of positive realities.
Is there not a certain irony in the fact that the application of “natural” psychology to the explanation of the thoughts of Jesus compels the assumption of supra-historical private information [pg 299] such as this? Bahrdt and Venturini hardly read more subjective interpretations into the text than many modern Lives of Jesus; and the hypothesis of the secret society, which after all did recognise and do justice to the inexplicability from an external standpoint of the relation of events and of the conduct of Jesus, was in many respects more historical than the psychological links of connexion which our modernising historians discover without having any foundation for them in the text.
In the end this supplementary knowledge destroys the historicity of the simplest sections. Oskar Holtzmann ventures to conjecture that the healing of the blind man at Jericho “is to be understood as a symbolical representation of the conversion of Zacchaeus,” which, of course, is found only in Luke. Here then the defender of the Marcan hypothesis rejects the incident by which the Evangelist explains the enthusiasm of the entry into Jerusalem, not to mention that Luke tells us nothing whatever about a conversion of Zacchaeus, but only that Jesus was invited to his house and graciously accepted the invitation.
It would be something if this almost Alexandrian symbolical exegesis contributed in some way to the removal of difficulties and to the solution of the main question, that, namely, of the present or future Messiah, the present or future Kingdom. Oskar Holtzmann lays great stress upon the eschatological character of the preaching of Jesus regarding the Kingdom, and assumes that, at least at the beginning, it would not have been natural for His hearers to understand that Jesus, the herald of the Messiah, was Himself the Messiah. Nevertheless, he is of opinion that, in a certain sense, the presence of Jesus implied the presence of the Kingdom, that Peter and the rest of the disciples, advancing beyond the ideas of the multitude, recognised Him as Messiah, that this recognition ought to have been possible for the people also, and, in that case, would have been “the strongest incentive to abandon evil ways,” and “that Jesus at the time of His entry into Jerusalem seems to have felt that in Isa. lxii. 11[228] there was a direct command not to withhold the knowledge of His Messiahship from the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”