tartly observes that he cannot see what the author of the "characterisation" stood to gain by underwriting Holtzmann's Marcan hypothesis.[1]
Weizsacker is still bolder in making interpolations from the Johannine tradition. He places the cleansing of the Temple, in contradiction to Mark, in the early period of Jesus' ministry, on the ground that "it bears the character of a first appearance, a bold deed with which to open His career." He fails to observe, however, that if this act really took place at this point of time, the whole development of the life of Jesus which Holtzmann had so ingeniously traced in Mark, is at once thrown into confusion. In describing the last visit to Jerusalem, Weizsacker is not content to insert the Marcan stones into the Johannine cement; he goes farther and expressly states that the great farewell discourses of Jesus to His disciples agree with the Synoptic discourses to the disciples spoken during the last days, however completely they of all others bear the peculiar stamp of the Johannine diction.
Thus in the second period of the Marcan hypothesis the same spectacle meets us as in the earlier. The hypothesis has a literary existence, indeed it is carried by Holtzmann to such a degree of demonstration that it can no longer be called a mere hypothesis, but it does not succeed in winning an assured position in the critical study of the Life of Jesus. It is common-land not yet taken into cultivation.
That is due in no small measure to the fact that Holtzmann did not work out the hypothesis from the historical side, but rather on literary lines, recalling Wilke-as a kind of problem in Synoptic arithmetic-and in his preface expresses dissent from the Tubingen school, who desired to leave no alternative between John on the one side and the Synoptics on the other, whereas he approves the attempt to evade the dilemma in some way or other, and thinks he can find in the didactic narrative of the Fourth Gospel the traces of a development of Jesus similar to that portrayed in the Synoptics, and has therefore no fundamental objection to the use of John alongside of the Synoptics. In taking up this position, however, he does not desire to be understood a meaning that "it would be to the interests of science to throw Synoptic and Johannine passages together indiscriminately and thus construct a life of Jesus out of them." "It would be much better first to reconstruct separately the Synoptic and Johannine pictures of Christ, composing each of its own distinctive material. It is only when this has been done that it is possible to make a fruitful comparison of the two." Exactly the same position had been taken up sixty-seven years
- ↑ The works of a Dutch writer named Stricker, Jesus von Nazareth (1868), and of the Englishman Sir Richard Hanson, The Jesus of History (1869), were based on Mark without any reference to John.
