There is this in common between rationalism and the liberal critical method, that each had followed out a theory to its ultimate consequences. The liberal critical school had carried to its limit the explanation of the connexion of the actions of Jesus, and of the events of His life, by a “natural” psychology; and the conclusions to which they had been driven had prepared the way for the recognition that the natural psychology is not here the historical psychology, but that the latter must be deduced from certain historical data. Thus through the meritorious and magnificently sincere work of the liberal critical school the a priori “natural” psychology gave way to the eschatological. That is the net result, from the historical point of view, of the study of the life of Jesus in the post-Straussian period.
XV. The Eschatological Question
Timothée Colani. Jésus-Christ et les croyances messianiques de son temps. Strassburg, 1864. 255 pp.
Gustav Volkmar. Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit, mit den beiden ersten Erzählern. (Jesus the Nazarene and the Beginnings of Christianity, with the two earliest narrators of His life.) Zurich, 1882. 403 pp.
Wilhelm Weiffenbach. Der Wiederkunftsgedanke Jesu. (Jesus' Conception of His Second Coming.) 1873. 424 pp.
W. Baldensperger. Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit. (The Self-consciousness of Jesus in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His time.) Strassburg, 1888. 2nd ed., 1892, 282 pp.; 3rd ed. pt. i. 240 pp.
Johannes Weiss. Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes. (The Preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God.) 1892. Göttingen. 67 pp. Second revised and enlarged edition, 1900, 210 pp.
So long as it was merely a question of establishing the distinctive character of the thought of Jesus as compared with the ancient prophetic and Danielic conceptions, and so long as the only available storehouse of Rabbinic and Late-Jewish ideas was Lightfoot's Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae in quatuor Evangelistas,[149] it was still possible to cherish the belief that the preaching of Jesus could be conceived as something which was, in the last analysis, independent of all contemporary ideas. But after the studies of Hilgenfeld and Dillmann[150] had made known the Jewish apocalyptic in its fundamental characteristics, and the Jewish pseudepigrapha were no longer looked on as “forgeries,” but as representative documents of the last stage of Jewish thought, the necessity of taking account of them in interpreting the thought of Jesus became more and more emphatic. Almost two decades [pg 223] were to pass, however, before the full significance of this material was realised.