in damping, flamed up again in the hearts of His disciples. The spiritual presence of the Deliverer ^ho had manifested Himself to them did not seem to them to be the fulfilment of the promise of the Second Coming; but the expectation of the latter, being brought into contact with the flame of eschatological hope with which their hearts were a-fire, was fused, and cast into a form quite different from that in which it had been derived from the words of Jesus.
That is all finely observed. For the first time it had dawned upon historical criticism that the great question is that concerning the identity or difference of the Parousia and the Resurrection. But the man who had been the first to grasp that thought, and who had undertaken his whole study with the special purpose of working it out, was too much under the influence of the spiritualised eschatology of Schleiermacher and Weisse to be able to assign the right values in the solution of his equation. And, withal, he is too much inclined to play the apologist as a subsidiary role. He is not content merely to render the history intelligible; he is, by his own confession, urged on by the hope that perhaps a way may be found of causing that "error" of Jesus to disappear and proving it to be an illusion due to the want of a sufficiently close study of His discourses. But the historian simply must not be an apologist; he must leave that to those who come after him and he may do so with a quiet mind, for the apologists, as we learn from the history of the Lives of Jesus, can get the better of any historical result whatever. It is, therefore, quite unnecessary that the historian should allow himself to be led astray by following an apologetic will-o'-the-wisp.
Technically regarded, the mistake on which Weiffenbach's investigation made shipwreck was the failure to bring the Jewish apocalyptic material into relation with the Synoptic data. If he had done this, it would have been impossible for him to extract an absolutely unreal and unhistorical conception of the Second Coming out of the discourses of Jesus.
The task which Weiffenbach had neglected remained undone-to the detriment of theology-until Baldensperger [1] repaired the omission. His book, "The Self-consciousness of Jesus in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His Time,"[2] published in 1888, made its impression by reason of the fullness of its material. Whereas Colani and Volkmar had still been able to deny the existence of
- ↑ Wilhelm Baldensperger, at present Professor at Giessen, was born in 1856 at Miilhausen in Alsace.
- ↑ A new edition appeared in 1891. There is no fundamental alteration, but in consequence of the polemic against opponents who had arisen in the meantime lt is fuller. The first pan of a third edition appeared in 1903 under the title Die messianisch-apokalyptischen Hoffnungen des Judentums. See also the interesting use made of Late-Jewish and Rabbinic ideas in Altrett Edersheim's The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 2nd ed., London, 1884, 2 vols.
