Mark. They thought they had nothing to do but to occupy a conquered territory, and never suspected that along the whole line they had only won a half victory, never having thought out to the end either the eschatological question or the fundamental historical question of the attitude of Jesus to the Messiahship.
They were not disquieted by the obstinate persistence of the discussion on the eschatological question. They thought it was merely a skirmish with a few unorganised guerillas; in reality it was the advance-guard of the army with which Reimarus was threatening their flank, and which under the leadership of Johannes Weiss was to bring them to so dangerous a pass. And while they were endeavouring to avoid this turning movement they fell into the ambush which Bruno Bauer had laid in their rear: Wrede held up the Marcan hypothesis and demanded the pass-word for the theory of the Messianic consciousness and claims of Jesus to which it was acting as convoy.
The eschatological and the literary school, finding themselves thus opposed to a common enemy, naturally formed an alliance. The object of their combined attack was not the Marcan outline of the life of Jesus, which, in fact, they both accept, but the modern "psychological" method of reading between the lines of the Marcan narrative. Under the cross fire of these allies that idea of development which had been the strongest entrenchment of the liberal critical Lives of Jesus, and which they had been desperately endeavouring to strengthen down to the very last, was finally blown to atoms.
But the striking thing about these liberal critical Lives of Jesus was that they unconsciously prepared the way for a deeper historical view which could not have been reached apart from them. A deeper understanding of a subject is only brought to pass when a theory is carried to its utmost limit and finally proves its own inadequacy.
There is this in common between rationalism and the liberal critical method, that each had followed out a theory to its ultimate consequences. The liberal critical school had carried to its limit the explanation of the connexion of the actions of Jesus, and of the events of His life, by a "natural" psychology; and the conclusions to which they had been driven had prepared the way for the recognition that the natural psychology is not here the historical psychology, but that the latter must be deduced from certain historical data. Thus through the meritorious and magnificently sincere work of the liberal critical school the a priori "natural" psychology gave way to the eschatological. That is the net result, from the historical point of view, of the study of the life of Jesus in the post-Straussian period.
