“It is only the fact that Mark is preceded by 'the book of the Birth (and History) of Christ according to Matthew'—not only in the Scriptures, but also in men's minds, which were dominated by it as the ‘first Gospel’—which has caused it to be taken as self-evident that Jesus, knowing Himself from the first to be the Messiah, expected His Parousia solely from heaven, and therefore with, or in, the clouds of heaven.... But since He who was thought of as by birth the Son of God, is now thought of as the Son of Man, born an Israelite, and becoming the Son of God after the spirit only at His baptism, the hope that looks to the clouds of heaven cannot be, or at least ought not to be, any longer explained otherwise than as an enthusiastic dream.”
If, even at the beginning of the 'eighties, a so extreme theory on the other side could, without opposition, occupy all the points of vantage, it is evident that the theory which gave eschatology its due place was making but slow progress. It was not that any one had been disputing the ground with it, but that all its operations were characterised by a nervous timidity. And these hesitations are not to be laid to the account of those who did not perceive the approach of the decisive conflict, or refused to accept battle, like the followers of Reuss, for instance, who were satisfied with the hypothesis that thoughts about the Last Judgment had forced their way into the authentic discourses of Jesus about the destruction of the city;[152] even those who like Weiffenbach are fully convinced that “the eschatological question, and in particular the question of the Second Coming, which in many quarters has up to the present been treated as a noli me tangere, must sooner or later become the battle-ground of the greatest and most decisive of theological controversies”—even those who shared this conviction stopped half-way on the road on which they had entered.
Weiffenbach's[153] work, “Jesus' Conception of His Second Coming,” published in 1873, sums up the results of the previous discussions of the subject. He names as among those who ascribe the [pg 229] expectation of the Parousia, in the sensuous form in which it meets us in the documents, to a misunderstanding of the teaching of Jesus on the part of the disciples and the writers who were dependent upon them—Schleiermacher, Bleek, Holtzmann, Schenkel, Colani, Baur, Hase, and Meyer. Among those who maintained that the Parousia formed an integral part of Jesus' teaching, he cites Keim, Weizsäcker, Strauss, and Renan. He considers that the readiest way to advance the discussion will be by undertaking a critical review of the attempt to analyse the great Synoptic discourse about the future in which Colani had led the way.
The question of the Parousia is like, Weiffenbach suggests, a vessel which has become firmly wedged between rocks. Any attempt to get it afloat again will be useless until a new channel is found for it. His detailed discussions are devoted to endeavouring to discover the relation between the declarations regarding the Second Coming and the predictions of the Passion. In the course of his analysis of the great prophetic discourse he rejects the suggestion made by Weisse in his Evangelienfrage of 1856, that the eschatological character of the discourse results from the way in which it is put together; that while the sayings in their present mosaic-like combination certainly have a reference to the last things, each of them individually in its original context might well bear a natural sense. In Colani's hypothesis of conflation the suggestion was to be rejected that it was not “Ur-Markus,” but the author of the Synoptic apocalypse who was responsible for the working in of the “Little Apocalypse.”[154] It was an unsatisfactory feature of Weizsäcker's position[155] that he insisted on regarding the “Little Apocalypse” as Jewish, not Jewish-Christian; Pfleiderer had distinguished sharply what belongs to the Evangelist from the “Little Apocalypse,” and had sought to prove that the purpose of the Evangelist in thus breaking up the latter and working it into a discourse of Jesus was to tone down the eschatological hopes expressed in the discourse, because they had remained unfulfilled even at the fall of Jerusalem, and to retard the rapid development of the apocalyptic process by inserting between its successive phases passages from a different discourse.[156] Weiffenbach carries this series of tentative suggestions to its logical conclusion, advancing the view that the link of connexion between [pg 230] the Jewish-Christian Apocalypse and the Gospel material in which it is embedded is the thought of the Second Coming. This was the thought which gave the impulse from without towards the transmutation of Jewish into Jewish-Christian eschatology. Jesus must have given expression to the thought of His near return; and Jewish-Christianity subsequently painted it over with the colours of Jewish eschatology.
In developing this theory, Weiffenbach thought that he had succeeded in solving the problem which had been first critically formulated by Keim, who is constantly emphasising the idea that the eschatological hopes of the disciples could not be explained merely from their Judaic pre-suppositions, but that some incentive to the formation of these hopes must be sought in the preaching of Jesus; otherwise primitive Christianity and the life of Jesus would stand side by side unconnected and unexplained, and in that case we must give up all hope “of distinguishing the sure word of the Lord from Israel's restless speculations about the future.”
When the Jewish-Christian Apocalypse has been eliminated, we arrive at a discourse, spoken on the Mount of Olives, in which Jesus exhorted His disciples to watchfulness, in view of the near, but nevertheless undefined, hour of the return of “the Master of the House.”
In this discourse, therefore, we have a standard by which criticism may test all the eschatological sayings and discourses. Weiffenbach has the merit of having gathered together all the eschatological material of the Synoptics and examined it in the light of a definite principle. In Colani the material was incomplete, and instead of a critical principle he offered only an arbitrary exegesis which permitted him, for example, to conceive the watchfulness on which the eschatological parables constantly insist as only a vivid expression for the sense of responsibility “which weighs upon the life of man.”
And yet the outcome of this attempt of Weiffenbach's, which begins with so much real promise, is in the end wholly unsatisfactory. The “authentic thought of the return” which he takes as his standard has for its sole content the expectation of a visible personal return in the near future “free from all more or less fantastic apocalyptic and Jewish-Christian speculations about the future.” That is to say, the whole of the eschatological discourses of Jesus are to be judged by the standard of a colourless, unreal figment of theology. Whatever cannot be squared with that is to be declared spurious and cut away! Accordingly the eschatological closing saying at the Last Supper is stigmatised as a “Chiliastic-Capernaitic”[157] distortion of a “normal” promise of the Second Coming; the idea of the παλιγγενεσία, Matt. xix. 28, is said to be [pg 231] wholly foreign to Jesus' world of thought; it is impossible, too, that Jesus can have thought of Himself as the Judge of the world, for the Jewish and Jewish-Christian eschatology does not ascribe the conduct of the Last Judgment to the Messiah; that is first done by Gentile Christians, and especially by Paul. It was, therefore, the later eschatology which set the Son of Man on the throne of His glory and prepared “the twelve thrones of judgment for the disciples.” The historian ought only to admit such of the sayings about bearing rule in the Messianic Kingdom as can be interpreted in a spiritual, non-sensuous fashion.
In the end Weiffenbach's critical principle proves to be merely a bludgeon with which he goes seal-hunting and clubs the defenceless Synoptic sayings right and left. When his work is done you see before you a desert island strewn with quivering corpses. Nevertheless the slaughter was not aimless, or at least it was not without result.