a fully formed Messianic expectation in the time of Jesus, the genesis of the expectation was now fully traced out, and it was shown that the world of thought which meets us in Daniel had won the victory, that the "Son of Man" Messiah of the Similitudes of Enoch was the last product of the Messianic hope prior to the time of Jesus; and that therefore the fully developed Danielic scheme with its unbridgeable chasm between the present and the future world furnished the outline within which all further and more detailed traits were inserted. The honour of having effectively pioneered the way for this discovery belongs to Schurer.[1] Baldensperger adopts his ideas, but sets them forth in a much more direct way, because he, in contrast with Schurer, gives no system of Messianic expectation-and there never in reality was a system-but is content to picture its many-sided growth.
He does not, it is true, escape some minor inconsistencies. For example, the idea of a "political Messiahship," which is really set aside by his historical treatment, crops up here and there, as though the author had not entirely got rid of it himself. But the impression made by the book as a whole was overpowering.
Nevertheless this book does not exactly fulfil the promise of its title, any more than Weiffenbach's. The reader expects that now at last Jesus' sayings about Himself will be consistently explained in the light of the Jewish Messianic ideas, but that is not done. For Baldensperger, instead of tracing down and working out the conception of the Kingdom of God held by Jesus as a product of the Jewish eschatology, at least by way of trying whether that method would suffice, takes it over direct from modern historical theology. He assumes as self-evident that Jesus' conception of the Kingdom of God had a double character, that the eschatological and spiritual elements were equally represented in it and mutually conditioned one another, and that Jesus therefore began, in pursuance of this conception, to found a spiritual invisible Kingdom, although He expected its fulfilment to be effected by supernatural means. Consequently there must also have been a
- ↑ Emil Schiirer, Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi. (History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ.) 2nd ed., part second, 1886, pp. 417 S. Here is to be found also a bibliography of the older literature of the subject. 3rd ed., 1889, vol. ii. pp. 498 ff. Emil Schurer was born at Augsburg in 1844, and from 1873 onwards was successively Professor at Leipzig, Giessen, and Kiel, and is now (1909) at Gottingen. The latest presentment of Jewish apocalyptic is Die judische Eschatologie van Daniel bis Akiba, by Paul Volz, Pastor in Leonberg. Tubingen, 1903. 412 pp. The material is very completely given. Unfortunately the author has chosen the systematic method of treating his subject, instead of tracing the history of its development, the only right way. As a consequence Jesus and Paul occupy far too little space ln this survey of Jewish apocalyptic. For a treatment of the origin of Jewish eschatology from the point of view of the history of religion see Hugo Gressmann, now Professor at Berlin, Der Ursprung der israelitisch-judischen Eschatologie (The Origin of the Israelitish and Jewish Eschatology), Gottingen, 1905. 377 pp.
