Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak. Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
Anyone who, admiring the force and authority of genuine rationalism, has got rid of the naïve self-satisfaction of modern theology, which is in essence only the degenerate offspring of rationalism with a tincture of history, rejoices in the feebleness and smallness of its professedly historical Jesus, rejoices in all those who are beginning to doubt the truth of this portrait, rejoices in the over-severity with which it is attacked, rejoices to take a share in its destruction.
Those who have begun to doubt are many, but most of them only make known their doubts by their silence. There is one, however, who has spoken out, and one of the greatest—Otto Pfleiderer.[240]
In the first edition of his Urchristentum, published in 1887, he still shared the current conceptions and constructions, except that he held the credibility of Mark to be more affected than was [pg 312] usually supposed by hypothetical Pauline influences. In the second edition[241] his positive knowledge has been ground down in the struggle with the sceptics—it is Brandt who has especially affected him—and with the partisans of eschatology. This is the first advance-guard action of modern theology coming into touch with the troops of Reimarus and Bruno Bauer.
Pfleiderer accepts the purely eschatological conception of the Kingdom of God and holds also that the ethics of Jesus were wholly conditioned by eschatology. But in regard to the question of the Messiahship of Jesus he takes his stand with the sceptics. He rejects the hypothesis of a Messiah who, as being a “spiritual Messiah,” conceals His claim, but on the other hand, he cannot accept the eschatological Son-of-Man Messiahship having reference to the future, which the eschatological school finds in the utterances of Jesus, since it implies prophecies of His suffering, death, and resurrection which criticism cannot admit. “Instead of finding the explanation of how the Messianic title arose in the reflections of Jesus about the death which lay before Him,” he is inclined to find it “rather in the reflection of the Christian community upon the catastrophic death and exaltation of its Lord after this had actually taken place.”
Even the Marcan narrative is not history. The scepticism in regard to the main source, with which writers like Oskar Holtzmann, Schmiedel, and von Soden conduct a kind of intellectual flirtation, is here erected into a principle. “It must be recognised,” says Pfleiderer, “that in respect of the recasting of the history under theological influences, the whole of our Gospels stand in principle on the same footing. The distinction between Mark, the other two Synoptists, and John is only relative—a distinction of degree corresponding to different stages of theological reflection and the development of the ecclesiastical consciousness.” If only Bruno Bauer could have lived to see this triumph of his opinions!
Pfleiderer, however, is conscious that scepticism, too, has its difficulties. He wishes, indeed, to reject the confession of Jesus before the Sanhedrin “because its historicity is not well established (none of the disciples were present to hear it, and the apocalyptic prophecy which is added, Mark xiv. 62, is certainly derived from the ideas of the primitive Church)”; on the other hand, he is inclined to admit as possibilities—though marking them with a note of interrogation—that Jesus may have accepted the homage of the Passover pilgrims, and that the controversy with the Scribes [pg 313] about the Son of David had some kind of reference to Jesus Himself.
On the other hand, he takes it for granted that Jesus did not prophesy His death, on the ground that the arrest, trial, and betrayal must have lain outside all possibility of calculation even for Him. All these, he thinks, came upon Jesus quite unexpectedly. The only thing that He might have apprehended was “an attack by hired assassins,” and it is to this that He refers in the saying about the two swords in Luke xxii. 36 and 38, seeing that two swords would have sufficed as a protection against such an attack as that, though hardly for anything further. When, however, he remarks in this connexion that “this has been constantly overlooked” in the romances dealing with the Life of Jesus, he does injustice to Bahrdt and Venturini, since according to them the chief concern of the secret society in the later period of the life of Jesus was to protect Jesus from the assassination with which He was menaced, and to secure His formal arrest and trial by the Sanhedrin. Their view of the historical situation is therefore identical with Pfleiderer's, viz. that assassination was possible, but that administrative action was unexpected and is inexplicable.
But how is this Jesus to be connected with primitive Christianity? How did the primitive Church's belief in the Messiahship of Jesus arise? To that question Pfleiderer can give no other answer than that of Volkmar and Brandt, that is to say, none. He laboriously brings together wood, straw, and stubble, but where he gets the fire from to kindle the whole into the ardent faith of primitive Christianity he is unable to make clear.