repeatedly have refused Messianic salutations, and not until the triumphal entry suffered the people to hail Him as Messiah?
The questions are rightly asked; it is therefore the more pity that they are wrongly answered. It follows, Weisse says, from the above considerations that Jesus did not assume an acquaintance on the part of His hearers with the Old Testament Messianic significance of the expression. "It was therefore incontestably the intention of Jesus�and any one who considers it unworthy betrays thereby his own want of insight�that the designation should have something mysterious about it, something which would compel His hearers to reflect upon His meaning." The expression Son of Man was calculated to lead them on to higher conceptions of His nature and origin, and therefore sums up in itself the whole spiritualisation of the Messiahship.
Weisse, therefore, passionately rejects any suggestion, however modest, that Jesus' self-designation, Son of Man, implies any measure of acceptance of the Jewish apocalyptic system of ideas. Ewald had furnished forth his Life of Jesus [1] with a wealth of Old Testament learning, and had made some half-hearted attempts to show the connexion of Jesus' system of thought with that of post-canonical Judaism, but without taking the matter seriously and without having any suspicion of the real character of the eschatology of Jesus. But even these parade-ground tactics excite Weisse's indignation; in his book, published in 1856, he reproaches Ewald with failing to understand his task.
The real duty of criticism is, according to Weisse, to show that Jesus had no part in those fantastic errors which are falsely attributed to Him when a literal Jewish interpretation is given to His great sayings about the future of the Son of Man, and to remove all the obstacles which seem to have prevented hitherto the recognition of the novel character and special significance of the expression. Son of Man, in the mouth of Him who, of His own free choice, applied this name to Himself. "How long will it be," he cries, "before theology at last becomes aware of the deep importance of its task? Historical criticism, exercised with all the thoroughness and impartiality which alone can produce a genuine conviction, must free the Master's own teaching from the imputation that lies upon it�the imputation of sharing the errors and false expectations in which, as we cannot deny, owing to imperfect or mistaken understanding of the suggestions of the Master, the Apostles, and with them the whole early Christian Church, became involved."
This fundamental position determines the remainder of Weisse's views. Jesus cannot have shared the Jewish particularism. He
- ↑ Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit. (History of Christ and His Times.) By Heinrich Ewald, Gottingen, 1855, 450 pp.
