In the year 1882 Volkmar took up this attempt afresh, at least in its main features.[151] His construction rests upon two main points of support; upon his view of the sources and his conception of the eschatology of the time of Jesus. In his view the sole source for the Life of Jesus is the Gospel of Mark, which was “probably written exactly in the year 73,” five years after the Johannine apocalypse.
The other two of the first three Gospels belong to the second century, and can only be used by way of supplement. Luke dates from the beginning of the first decade of the century; while Matthew is regarded by Volkmar, as by Wilke, as being a combination of Mark and Luke, and is relegated to the end of this first decade. The work is in his opinion a revision of the Gospel tradition “in the spirit of that primitive Christianity which, while constantly opposing the tendency of the apostle of the Gentiles to make light of the Law, was nevertheless so far universalistic that, starting from the old legal ground, it made the first steps towards a catholic unity.” Once Matthew has been set aside in this way, the literary elimination of the eschatology follows as a matter of course; the much smaller element of discourse in Mark can offer no serious resistance.
As regards the Messianic expectations of the time, they were, in Volkmar's opinion, such that Jesus could not possibly have come [pg 226] forward with Messianic claims. The Messianic Son of Man, whose aim was to found a super-earthly Kingdom, only arose in Judaism under the influence of Christian dogma. The contemporaries of Jesus knew only the political ideal of the Messianic King. And woe to any one who conjured up these hopes! The Baptist had done so by his too fervent preaching about repentance and the Kingdom, and had been promptly put out of the way by the Tetrarch. The version found even in Mark, which represents that it was on Herodias' account, and at her daughter's petition, that John was beheaded, is a later interpretation which, according to Volkmar, is evidently false on chronological grounds, since the Baptist was dead before Herod took Herodias as his wife. Had Jesus desired the Messiahship, He could only have claimed it in this political sense. The alternative is to suppose that He did not desire it.
Volkmar's contribution to the subject consists in the formulating of this clean-cut alternative. Colani had indeed recognised the alternative, but had not taken up a consistent attitude in regard to it. Here, that way of escape from the difficulty is barred, which suggests that Jesus set Himself up as Messiah, but in another than the popular sense. What may be called Jesus' Messianic consciousness consisted solely “in knowing Himself to be first-born among many brethren, the Son of God after the Spirit, and consequently feeling Himself enabled and impelled to bring about that regeneration of His people which alone could make it worthy of deliverance.” It is in any case clearly evident from Paul, from the Apocalypse, and from Mark, “the three documentary witnesses emanating from the circle of the followers of Jesus during the first century, that it was only after His crucifixion that Jesus was hailed as the Christ; never during His earthly life.” The elimination of the eschatology thus leads also to the elimination of the Messiahship of Jesus.
If we are told in Mark viii. 29 that Simon Peter was the first among men to hail Jesus as the Messiah, it is to be noticed, Volkmar points out, that the Evangelist places this confession at a time when Jesus' work was over and the thought of His Passion first appears; and if we desire fully to understand the author's purpose we must fix our attention on the Lord's command not to make known His Messiahship until after His resurrection (Mark viii. 30, ix. 9 and 10), which is a hint that we are to date Jesus' Messiahship from His death. For Mark is no mere naïve chronicler, but a conscious artist interpreting the history; sometimes, indeed, a powerful epic writer in whose work the historical and the poetic are intermingled.
Thus the conclusion is that Mark, in agreement with Paul, represents Jesus as becoming the Messiah only as a consequence of His resurrection. He really appeared, and His first appearance [pg 227] was to Peter. When Peter on that night of terror fled from Jerusalem to take refuge in Galilee, Jesus, according to the mystic prediction of Mark xiv. 28 and xvi. 7, went before him. “He was constantly present to his spirit, until on the third day He manifested Himself before his eyes, in the heavenly appearance which was also vouchsafed to the last of the apostles 'as he was in the way'—and Peter, enraptured, gave expression to the clear conviction with which the whole life of Jesus had inspired him in the cry 'Thou art the Christ.'”
The historical Jesus therefore founded a community of followers without advancing any claims to the Messiahship. He desired only to be a reformer, the spiritual deliverer of the people of God, to realise upon earth the Kingdom of God which they were all seeking in the beyond, and to extend the reign of God over all nations. “The Kingdom of God is doubtless to win its final and decisive victory by the almighty aid of God; our duty is to see to its beginnings”—that is, according to Volkmar, the lesson which Jesus teaches us in the parable of the Sower. The ethic of this Kingdom was not yet confused by any eschatological ideas. It was only when, as the years went on, the expectation of the Parousia rose to a high pitch of intensity that “marriage and the bringing up of children came to be regarded as superfluous, and were consequently thought of as signs of an absorption in earthly interests which was out of harmony with the near approach to the goal of these hopes.” Jesus had renewed the foundations on which “the family” was based and had made it, in turn, a corner stone of the Kingdom of God, even as He had consecrated the common meal by making it a love feast.
In most things Jesus was conservative. The ritual worship of the God of Israel remained for Him always a sacred thing. But in spite of that He withdrew more and more from the synagogue, the scene of His earliest preaching, and taught in the houses of His disciples. “He had learned to fulfil the law as implicit in one highest commandment and supreme principle, therefore 'in spirit and in truth'; but He never, as appears from all the evidence, declared it to be abolished.” “We may be equally certain, however, that Jesus, while He asserted the abiding validity of the Ten Commandments, never explicitly declared that of the Mosaic Law as a whole. The absence of any such saying from the tradition regarding Jesus made it possible for Paul to take his decisive step forward.”
As regards the Gospel discourses about the Parousia, it is easy to recognise that, even in Mark, these “are one and all the work of the narrator, whose purpose is edification. He connects his work as closely as possible with the Apocalypse, which had appeared some five years earlier, in order to emphasise, in contrast to it, the [pg 228] higher truth.” Jesus' own hope, in all its clearness and complete originality, is recorded in the parables of the seed growing secretly and the grain of mustard seed, and in the saying about the immortality of His words. Nothing beyond this is in any way certain, however remarkable the saying in Mark ix. 1 may be, that the looked-for consummation is to take place during the lifetime of the existing generation.