But if Jesus made a Messianic entry He must thereafter have given Himself out as Messiah, and the whole controversy would necessarily have turned upon this claim. This, however, was not the case. According to Holtzmann, all that the hearers could make out of that crucial question for the Messiahship in Mark xii. 35-37 was only “that Jesus clearly showed from the Scriptures that the Messiah was not in reality the son of David.”[229]
But how was it that the Messianic enthusiasm on the part of the people did not lead to a Messianic controversy, in spite of the fact that Jesus “from the first came forward in Jerusalem as Messiah”? This difficulty O. Holtzmann seems to be trying to provide against when he remarks in a footnote: “We have no evidence that Jesus, even during the last sojourn in Jerusalem, was recognised as Messiah except by those who belonged to the inner circle of disciples. The repetition by the children of the acclamations of the disciples (Matt. xxi. 15 and 16) can hardly be considered of much importance in this connexion.” According to this, Jesus entered Jerusalem as Messiah, but except for the disciples and a few children no one recognised His entry as having a Messianic significance! But Mark states that many spread their garments upon the way, and others plucked down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way, and that those that went before and those that followed after, cried “Hosanna!” The Marcan narrative must therefore be kept out of sight for the moment in order that the Life of Jesus as conceived by the modern Marcan hypothesis may not be endangered.
We should not, however, regard the evidence of supernatural knowledge and the self-contradictions of this Life of Jesus as a matter for censure, but rather as a proof of the merits of O. Holtzmann's work.[230] He has written the last large-scale Life of Jesus, the only one which the Marcan hypothesis has produced, and aims at providing a scientific basis for the assumptions which the general lines of that hypothesis compel him to make; and in [pg 301] this process it becomes clearly apparent that the connexion of events can only be carried through at the decisive passages by violent treatment, or even by rejection of the Marcan text in the interests of the Marcan hypothesis.
These merits do not belong in the same measure to the other modern Lives of Jesus, which follow more or less the same lines. They are short sketches, in some cases based on lectures, and their brevity makes them perhaps more lively and convincing than Holtzmann's work; but they take for granted just what he felt it necessary to prove. P. W. Schmidt's[231] Geschichte Jesu (1899), which as a work of literary art has few rivals among theological works of recent years, confines itself to pure narrative. The volume of prolegomena which appeared in 1904, and is intended to exhibit the foundations of the narrative, treats of the sources, of the Kingdom of God, of the Son of Man, and of the Law. It makes the most of the weakening of the eschatological standpoint which is manifested in the second edition of Johannes Weiss's “Preaching of Jesus,” but it does not give sufficient prominence to the difficulties of reconstructing the public ministry of Jesus.
Neither Otto Schmiedel's “The Principal Problems of the Study of the Life of Jesus,” nor von Soden's “Vacation Lectures” on “The Principal Questions in the Life of Jesus” fulfils the promise of its title.[232] They both aim rather at solving new problems proposed by themselves than at restating the old ones and adding new. They hope to meet the views of Johannes Weiss by strongly emphasising the eschatology, and think they can escape the critical scepticism of writers like Volkmar and Brand by assuming an “Ur-Markus.” Their view is, therefore, that with a few modifications dictated by the eschatological and sceptical school, the traditional conception of the Life of Jesus is still tenable, whereas it is just the a priori presuppositions of this conception, hitherto held to be self-evident, which constitute the main problems.
“It is self-evident,” says von Soden in one passage, “in view of the inner connexion in which the Kingdom of God and the Messiah stood in the thoughts of the people ... that in all classes the question must have been discussed, so that Jesus could not permanently have avoided their question, ‘What of the Messiah? Art thou not He?’ ” Where, in the Synoptics, is there a word to show that this is “self-evident”? When the disciples in Mark viii. tell Jesus “whom men held Him to be,” none of them suggests that any one had been tempted to regard Him as the Messiah. And that was shortly before Jesus set out for Jerusalem.
From the day when the envoys of the Scribes from Jerusalem first appeared in the north, the easily influenced Galilaean multitude began, according to von Soden, “to waver.” How does he know that the Galilaeans were easily influenced? How does he know they “wavered”? The Gospels tell us neither one nor the other. The demand for a sign was, to quote von Soden again, a demand for a proof of His Messiahship. “Yet another indication,” adds the author, “that later Christianity, in putting so high a value on the miracles of Jesus as a proof of His Messiahship, departed widely from the thoughts of Jesus.”
Before levelling reproaches of this kind against later Christianity, it would be well to point to some passage of Mark or Matthew in which there is mention of a demand for a sign as a proof of His Messiahship.
When the appearance of Jesus in the south—we are still following von Soden—aroused the Messianic expectations of the people, as they had formerly been aroused in His native country, “they once more failed to understand the correction of them which Jesus had made by the manner of His entry and His conduct in Jerusalem.” They are unable to understand this “transvaluation of values,” and as often as the impression made by His personality suggested the thought that He was the Messiah, they became doubtful again. Wherein consisted the correction of the Messianic expectation given at the triumphal entry? Was it that He rode upon an ass? Would it not be better if modern historical theology, instead of always making the people “grow doubtful,” were to grow a little doubtful of itself, and begin to look for the evidence of that “transvaluation of values” which, according to them, the contemporaries of Jesus were not able to follow?
Von Soden also possesses special information about the “peculiar history of the origin” of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus. He knows that it was subsidiary to a primary general religious consciousness of Sonship. The rise of this Messianic consciousness implies, in its turn, the “transformation of the conception of the Kingdom of God, and explains how in the mind of Jesus this conception was both present and future.” The greatness [pg 303] of Jesus is, he thinks, to be found in the fact that for Him this Kingdom of God was only a “limiting conception”—the ultimate goal of a gradual process of approximation. “To the question whether it was to be realised here or in the beyond Jesus would have answered, as He answered a similar question, ‘That, no man knoweth; no, not the Son.’ ”