intelligence, or special courage. Must we never speak of a victory so long as a single enemy remains alive? Individual attempts to combine John with the Synoptics which appeared after this decisive point are in some cases deserving of special attention, as for example, Wendt's [1] acute study of the "Teaching of Jesus," which has all the importance of a full treatment of the "Life." But the very way in which Wendt grapples with his task shows that the main issue is already decided. All he can do is to fight a skilful and determined rearguard action. It is not the Fourth Gospel as it stands, but only a "ground-document" on which it is based, which he, in common with Weiss, Alexander Schweizer, and Renan, would have to be recognised "alongside of the Gospel of Mark and the Logia of Matthew as an historically trustworthy tradition regarding the teaching of Jesus," and which may be used along with those two writings in forming a picture of the Life of Jesus. For Wendt there is no longer any question of an interweaving and working up together of the individual sections of John and the Synoptists. He takes up much the same standpoint as Holtzmann occupied in 1863, but he provides a much more comprehensive and well-tested basis for it.
In the end there is no such very great difference between Wendt and the writers who had advanced to the conviction of the irreconcilability ot the two traditions. Wendt refuses to give up the Fourth Gospel altogether; they, on their part, won only a half victory because they did not as a matter of fact escape from the Johannine interpretation of the Synoptics. By means of their psychological interpretation of the first three Gospels they make for themselves an ideal Fourth Gospel, in the interests of which they reject the existing Fourth Gospel. They will hear nothing of the spiritualised Johannine Christ, and refuse to acknowledge even to themselves that they have only deposed Him in order to put in His place a spiritualised Synoptic Jesus Christ, that is, a man who claimed to be the Messiah, but in a spiritual sense. All the development which they discover in Jesus is in the last analysis only an evidence of the tension between the Synoptics, in their natural literal sense and the "Fourth Gospel" which is extracted from them by an artificial interpretation.
The fact is, the separation between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel is only the first step to a larger result which
- ↑ H. H. Wendt, Die Lehre Jesu, vol. i. Die evangelischen Quellenberichte uber die Lehre Jesu. (The Record of the Teaching of Jesus in the Gospel Sources.) 354 pp. Gottingen, 1886; vol. ii, 1890; Eng. trans., 1892. Second German edition in one vol., 626 pp., 1901. See also the same writer's Das Johannesevangelium. Untersechung seiner Entstehung und seines geschichtlichen Wertes, 1900. (The Gospel of John: An Investigation of its Origin and Historical Value.) Hans Heinrich Wendt was born in 1853 at Hamburg, qualified as Privat-Docent in 1877 at Gottingen, was subsequently Extraordinary Professor at Kiel and Heidelberg, and now works at Jena.
