it in so independent and individual a fashion. In this, therefore Strauss has become the pupil of Weisse.
Even in the Old Testament prophecies, he explains, we find two conceptions, a more ideal and a more practical. Jesus holds consistently to the first, He describes Himself as the Son of Man because this designation "contains the suggestion of humility and lowliness, of the human and natural." At Jerusalem, Jesus, in giving His interpretation of Psalm cx., "made merry over the Davidic descent of the Messiah." He desired "to be Messiah in the sense of a patient teacher exercising a quiet influence." As the opposition of the people grew more intense He took up some of the features of Isaiah liii. into His conception of the Messiah.
Of His resurrection, Jesus can only have spoken in a metaphorical sense. It is hardly credible that one who was pure man could have arrogated to himself the position of judge of the world. Strauss would like best to ascribe all the eschatology to the distorting medium of early Christianity, but he does not venture to carry this through with logical consistency. He takes it as certain, however, that Jesus, even though it sometimes seems as if He did not expect the Kingdom to be realised in the present, but in a future, world-era, and to be brought about by God in a supernatural fashion, nevertheless sets about the establishment of the Kingdom by purely spiritual influence.
With this end in view He leaves Galilee, when He judges the time to be ripe, in order to work on a larger scale. "In case of an unfavourable issue, He reckons on the influence which a martyr-death has never failed to exercise in giving momentum to a lofty idea." How far He had advanced, when He entered on the fateful journey to Jerusalem, in shaping His plan, and especially in organising the company of adherents who had gathered about Him, it is impossible to determine with anv exactness. He permitted the triumphal entry because He did not desire to decline the role of the Messiah in every aspect of it.
Owing to this arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptic Jesus, Strauss's picture is in essence much more unhistorical than Renan's. The latter had not needed to deny that Jesus had done miracles, and he had been able to suggest an explanation of how Jesus came in the end to fall back upon the eschatological system of ideas. But at what a price! By portraying Jesus as at variance with Himself, a hero broken in spirit. This price is too high for Strauss. Arbitrary as his treatment of history is, he never loses the intuitive feeling that in Jesus' self-consciousness there is a unique absence of struggle; that He does not bear the scars which are found in those natures which win their way to freedom and purity through strife and conflict, that in Him there is no trace of the hardness, harshness, and gloom which cleave to such natures
