Lives of Jesus is a question to which we may answer "Yes; but along with the faults of these it has some others in addition." Weiss shares with the authors of the liberal "Lives" the assumption that Mark designed to set forth a definite "view of the course of development of the public ministry of Jesus," and on the strength of that believes himself justified in giving a very far-reaching significance to the details offered by this Evangelist. The arbitrariness with which he carries out this theory is quite as unbounded as Schenkel's, and in his fondness for the "argument from silence" he even surpasses him. Although Mark never allows a single word to escape him about the motives of the northern journeys, Weiss is so clever at reading between the lines that the motives are "quite sufficiently" clear to him. The object of these journeys was, according to his explanation, "that the people might have an opportunity, undistracted by the immediate impression of His words and actions, to make up their minds in regard to the questions which they had put to Him so pressingly and inescapably in the last days of His public ministry; they must themselves draw their own conclusions alike from the declarations and from the conduct of Jesus. Only by Jesus' removing Himself for a time from their midst could they come to a clear decision as to their attitude to Jesus." This modern psychologising however, is closely combined with a dialectic which seeks to show that there is no irreconcilable opposition between the belief in the Son of
