As he does not deal with the teaching of Jesus, he has no occasion to take account of the secret of the Kingdom of God. That is the more remarkable because corresponding to one fundamental idea of the Messianic secret there is a parallel, [pg 348] more general dogmatic conception in Jesus' preaching of the Kingdom. For if Jesus in Matt. x. gives the disciples nothing to take with them on their mission but predictions of suffering; if at the very beginning of His ministry He closes the Beatitudes with a blessing upon the persecuted; if in Mark viii. 34 ff. He warns the people that they will have to choose between life and life, between death and death; if, in short, from the first, He loses no opportunity of preaching about suffering and following Him in His sufferings; that is just as much a matter of dogma as His own sufferings and predictions of sufferings. For in both cases the necessity of suffering, the necessity of facing death, is not “a necessity of the historical situation,” not a necessity which arises out of the circumstances; it is an assertion put forth without empirical basis, a prophecy of storm while the sky is blue, since neither Jesus nor the people to whom He spoke were undergoing any persecution; and when His fate overtook Him not even the disciples were involved in it. It is distinctly remarkable that, except for a few meagre references, the enigmatic character of Jesus' constant predictions of suffering has not been discussed in the Life-of-Jesus literature.[268]
What has now to be done, therefore, is, in contradistinction to Wrede, to make a critical examination of the dogmatic element in the life of Jesus on the assumption that the atmosphere of the time was saturated with eschatology, that is, to keep in even closer touch with the facts than Wrede does, and moreover, to proceed, not from the particular to the general, but from the general to the particular, carefully considering whether the dogmatic element is not precisely the historical element. For, after all, why should not Jesus think in terms of doctrine, and make history in action, just as well as a poor Evangelist can do it on paper, under the pressure of the theological interests of the primitive community.
Once again, however, we must repeat that the critical analysis and the assertion of a system running through the disorder are the same in the eschatological as in the sceptical hypothesis, only that in the eschatological analysis a number of problems come more clearly to light. The two constructions are related like the bones and cartilage of the body. The general structure is the same, only that in the case of the one a solid substance, lime, is distributed even in the minutest portions, giving it firmness and solidity, while in the other case this is lacking. This reinforcing substance is the eschatological world-view.
How is it to be explained that Wrede, in spite of the eschatological school, in spite of Johannes Weiss, could, in critically [pg 349] investigating the connecting principle of the life of Jesus, simply leave eschatology out of account? The blame rests with the eschatological school itself, for it applied the eschatological explanation only to the preaching of Jesus, and not even to the whole of this, but only to the Messianic secret, instead of using it also to throw light upon the whole public work of Jesus, the connexion and want of connexion between the events. It represented Jesus as thinking and speaking eschatologically in some of the most important passages of His teaching, but for the rest gave as uneschatological a presentation of His life as modern historical theology had done. The teaching of Jesus and the history of Jesus were set in different keys. Instead of destroying the modern-historical scheme of the life of Jesus, or subjecting it to a rigorous examination, and thereby undertaking the performance of a highly valuable service to criticism, the eschatological theory confined itself within the limits of New Testament Theology, and left it to Wrede to reveal one after another by a laborious purely critical method the difficulties which from its point of view it might have grasped historically at a single glance. It inevitably follows that Wrede is unjust to Johannes Weiss and Johannes Weiss towards Wrede.[269]
It is quite inexplicable that the eschatological school, with its clear perception of the eschatological element in the preaching of the Kingdom of God, did not also hit upon the thought of the “dogmatic” element in the history of Jesus. Eschatology is simply “dogmatic history”—history as moulded by theological beliefs—which breaks in upon the natural course of history and abrogates. it. Is it not even a priori the only conceivable view that the conduct of one who looked forward to His Messianic “Parousia” in the near future should be determined, not by the natural course of events, but by that expectation? The chaotic confusion of the narratives ought to have suggested the thought that the events had been thrown into this confusion by the volcanic force of an incalculable personality, not by some kind of carelessness or freak of the tradition.
A very little consideration suffices to show that there is something quite incomprehensible in the public ministry of Jesus taken as a whole. According to Mark it lasted less than a year, for since he speaks of only one Passover-journey we may conclude that no other Passover fell within the period of Jesus' activity as a teacher. If it is proposed to assume that He allowed a Passover to go by without going up to Jerusalem, His adversaries, who took Him to task about hand-washings and about rubbing the ears of corn on the Sabbath, would certainly have made a most serious matter of this, and we should have to suppose that the Evangelist for some reason or other thought fit to suppress the fact. That is to say, the burden of proof lies upon those who assert a longer duration for the ministry of Jesus.
Until they have succeeded in proving it, we may assume something like the following course of events. Jesus, in going up to a Passover, came in contact with the movement initiated by John the Baptist in Judaea, and, after the lapse of a little time—if we bring into the reckoning the forty days' sojourn in the wilderness mentioned in Mark i. 13, a few weeks later—appeared in Galilee proclaiming the near approach of the Kingdom of God. According to Mark He had known Himself since His baptism to be the Messiah, but from the historical point of view that does not matter, since history is concerned with the first announcement of the Messiahship, not with inward psychological processes.[270]
This work of preaching the Kingdom was continued until the sending forth of the Twelve; that is to say, at the most for a few weeks. Perhaps in the saying “the harvest is great but the labourers are few,” with which Jesus closes His work prior to sending forth the disciples, there lies an allusion to the actual state of the natural fields. The flocking of the people to Him after the Mission of the Twelve, when a great multitude thronged about Him for several days during His journey along the northern shore of the lake, can be more naturally explained if the harvest had just been brought in.
However that may be, it is certain that Jesus, in the midst of His initial success, left Galilee, journeyed northwards, and only resumed His work as a teacher in Judaea on the way to Jerusalem! Of His “public ministry,” therefore, a large section falls out, being cancelled by a period of inexplicable concealment; it dwindles to [pg 351] a few weeks of preaching here and there in Galilee and the few days of His sojourn in Jerusalem.[271]
But in that case the public life of Jesus becomes practically unintelligible. The explanation that His cause in Galilee was lost, and that He was obliged to flee, has not the slightest foundation in the text.[272] That was recognised even by Keim, the inventor of the successful and unsuccessful periods in the life of Jesus, as is shown by his suggestion that the Evangelists had intentionally removed the traces of failure from the decisive period which led up to the northern journey. The controversy over the washing of hands in Mark vii. 1-23, to which appeal is always made, is really a defeat for the Pharisees. The theory of the “desertion of the Galilaeans,” which appears with more or less artistic variations in all modern Lives of Jesus, owes its existence not to any other confirmatory fact, but simply to the circumstance that Mark makes the simple statement: “And Jesus departed and went into the region of Tyre” (vii. 24) without offering any explanation of this decision.