De Jonge knows—he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which he everywhere gives the preference—that Jesus was between forty and fifty years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement in Luke iii. 23, that He was ὡσεί thirty years old, can only mislead those who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that “Jeschua, in consequence of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was.”
De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from obscurity, was a widower and had a little son—the “lad” of John vi. 9, who had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and many other things the author finds in “the glorious John.” According to De Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with “privy-finance-councillor” Zacchaeus.
But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!
De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by Kirchbach's book, “What did Jesus teach?”[250] but here everything, instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to have been acquainted with Noack's “History of Jesus,” otherwise he would hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.
The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian philosophy. The saying, “No man hath seen God at any time,” is to be understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the “Critique of Pure Reason.” Jesus always used the [pg 323] words “death” and “life” in a purely metaphorical sense. Eternal life is for Him not a life in another world, but in the present. He speaks of Himself as the Son of God, not as the Jewish Messiah. Son of Man is only the ethical explanation of Son of God. The only reason why a Son-of-Man problem has arisen, is because Matthew translated the ancient term Son of Man in the original collection of Logia “with extreme literality.”
The great discourse of Matt. xxiii. with its warnings and threatenings is, according to Kirchbach, merely “a patriotic oration in which Jesus gives expression in moving words to His opposition to the Pharisees and His inborn love of His native land.”
The teaching of Jesus is not ascetic, it closely resembles the real teaching of Epicurus, “that is, the rejection of all false metaphysics, and the resulting condition of blessedness, of makaria.” The only purpose of the demand addressed to the rich young man was to try him. “If the youth, instead of slinking away dejectedly because he was called upon to sell all his goods, had replied, confident in the possession of a rich fund of courage, energy, ability, and knowledge, ‘Right gladly. It will not go to my heart to part with my little bit of property; if I'm not to have it, why then I can do without it,’ the Rabbi would probably in that case not have taken him at his word, but would have said, ‘Young man, I like you. You have a good chance before you, you may do something in the Kingdom of God, and in any case for My sake you may attach yourself to Me by way of trial. We can talk about your stocks and bonds later.’ ”
Finally, Kirchbach succeeds, though only, it must be admitted, by the aid of some rather awkward phraseology, in spiritualising John vi. “It is not the body,” he explains, “of the long departed thinker, who apparently attached no importance whatever to the question of personal survival, that we, who understand Him in the right Greek sense, ‘eat’; in the sense which He intended, we eat and drink, and absorb into ourselves, His teaching, His spirit, His sublime conception of life, by constantly recalling them in connexion with the symbol of bread and flesh, the symbol of blood, the symbol of water.”[251]
Worthless as Kirchbach's Life of Jesus is from an historical point of view, it is quite comprehensible as a phase in the struggle between the modern view of the world and Jesus. The aim of the [pg 324] work is to retain His significance for a metaphysical and non-ascetic time; and since it is not possible to do this in the case of the historical Jesus, the author denies His existence in favour of an apocryphal Jesus.