the Jewish-Christian Apocalypse and the Gospel material in which it is imbedded is the thought of the Second Coming.
This was the thought which gave the impulse from without towards the transmutation of Jewish into Jewish-Christian eschatology. Jesus must have given expression to the thought of His near return; and Jewish- Christianity subsequently painted it over with the colours of Jewish eschatology.
In developing this theory, Weiffenbach thought that he had succeeded in solving the problem which had been first critically formulated by Keim, who is constantly emphasising the idea that the eschatological hopes of the disciples could not be explained merely from their Judaic pre-suppositions, but that some incentive to the formation of these hopes must be sought in the preaching of Jesus; otherwise primitive Christianity and the life of Jesus would stand side by side unconnected and unexplained, and in that case we must give up all hope "of distinguishing the sure word of the Lord from Israel's restless speculations about the future."
When the Jewish-Christian Apocalypse has been eliminated, we arrive at a discourse, spoken on the Mount of Olives, in which Jesus exhorted His disciples to watchfulness, in view of the near, but nevertheless undefined, hour of the return of "the Master of the House."
In this discourse, therefore, we have a standard by which criticism may test all the eschatological sayings and discourses. Weiffenbach has the merit of having gathered together all the eschatological material of the Synoptics and examined it in the light of a definite principle. In Colani the material was incomplete, and instead of a critical principle he offered only an arbitrary exegesis which permitted him, for example, to conceive the watchfulness on which the eschatological parables constantly insist as only a vivid expression for the sense of responsibility "which weighs upon the life of man."
And yet the outcome of this attempt of Weiffenbach's, which begins with so much real promise, is in the end wholly unsatisfactory. The "authentic thought of the return" which he takes as his standard has for its sole content the expectation of a visible personal return in the "ear future "free from all more or less fantastic apocalyptic and JewishChristian speculations about the future." That is to say, the whole of the eschatological discourses of Jesus are to be judged by the standard of a colourless, unreal figment of theology. Whatever cannot be squared "ith that is to be declared spurious and cut away! Accordingly the eschatological closing saying at the Last Supper is stigmatised as a Chiliastic-Capernaitic" [1] distortion of a "normal" promise of the Second Coming; the idea of the paliggenesia, Matt. xix. 28, is said to be
- ↑ By "Capernaitic" 'Weiffenbach apparently means literalistic; cf. John vi. 52 f.
