necessarily follows from it-the complete recognition of the fundamentally eschatological character of the teaching and influence of the Marcan and Matthaean Jesus. Inasmuch as they suppressed this consequence, Holtzmann, Schenkel, Hase, and Weizsacker, even after their critical conversion, still lay under the spell of the Fourth Gospel, of a modern, ideal Fourth Gospel. It is only when the eschatological question is decided that the problem of the relation of John to the Synoptics is finally laid to rest. The liberal Lives of Jesus grasped their incompatibility only from a literary point of view, not in its full historical significance.
There is another result in the acceptance of which the critical school had stopped half-way. If the Marcan plan be accepted, it follows that, setting aside the references to the Son of Man in Mark ii. 10 and 28, Jesus had never, previous to the incident at Caesarea Philippi, given Himself out to be the Messiah or been recognised as such. The perception of this fact marks one of the greatest advances in the study of the subject. This result, once accepted, ought necessarily to have suggested two questions: in the first place, why Jesus down to that moment had made a secret of His Messiahship even to His disciples; in the second place, whether at any time, and, if so, when and how, the people were made acquainted with His Messianic claims. As a fact, however, by the application of that ill-starred psychologising both questions were smothered; that is to say, a sham answer was given to them. It was regarded as self-evident that Jesus had concealed His Messiahship from His disciples for so long in order in the meantime to bring them, without their being aware of it, to a higher spiritual conception of the Messiah; it was regarded as equally self-evident that in the last weeks the Messianic claims of Jesus could no longer be hidden from the people, but that He did not openly avow them, but merely allowed them to be divined, in order to lead up the multitude to the recognition of the higher spiritual character of the office which He claimed for Himself.
These ingenious psychologists never seemed to perceive that there is not a word of all this in Mark; but that they had read it all into some of the most contradictory and inexplicable facts in the Gospels, and had thus created a Messiah who both wished to be Messiah and did not wish it and who in the end, so far as the people were concerned, both was and was not the Messiah. Thus these writers had only recognised the importance of the scene at Caesarea Philippi, they had not ventured to attack the general problem of Jesus' attitude in regard to the Messiahship, and had not reflected further on the mutually contradictory facts that Jesus purposed to be the Messiah and yet did not come forward publicly in that character.
Thus they had side-tracked the study of the subject, and based all their hopes of progress on an intensive exegesis of the detail of
