“The sole object of this argument is to prove that the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus, as expressed in the title ‘Son of Man,’ shares in the transcendental apocalyptic character of Jesus' idea of the Kingdom of God, and cannot be separated from that idea.” The only partially correct evaluation of the factors in the problem of the Life of Jesus which Baldensperger had taken over from contemporary theology, and which had hitherto prevented historical science from obtaining a solution of that problem, had now been corrected from the history itself, and it was now only necessary to insert the corrected data into the calculation.
Here is the point at which it is fitting to recall Reimarus. He [pg 240] was the first, and indeed, before Johannes Weiss, the only writer who recognised and pointed out that the preaching of Jesus was purely eschatological. It is true that his conception of the eschatology was primitive, and that he applied it not as a constructive, but as a destructive principle of criticism. But read his statement of the problem “with the signs changed,” and with the necessary deduction for the primitive character of the eschatology, and you have the view of Weiss.
Ghillany, too, has a claim to be remembered. When Weiss asserts that the part played by Jesus was not the active rôle of establishing the Kingdom, but the passive rôle of waiting for the coming of the Kingdom; and that it was, in a sense, only by the acceptance of His sufferings that He emerged from that passivity; he is only asserting what Ghillany had maintained thirty years before with the same arguments and with the same decisiveness. But Weiss places the assertion on a scientifically unassailable basis.
XVI. The Struggle Against Eschatology
Wilhelm Bousset. Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum. Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich. (The Antithesis between Jesus' Preaching and Judaism. A Religious-Historical Comparison.) Göttingen, 1892. 130 pp.
Erich Haupt. Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien. (The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.) 1895. 167 pp.
Paul Wernle. Die Anfänge unserer Religion. Tübingen-Leipzig, 1901; 2nd ed., 1904, 410 pp.
Emil Schürer. Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu-Christi. 1903. Akademische Festrede. (The Messianic Self-consciousness of Jesus Christ.) 24 pp.