Daniel, men's imaginations had surrounded the Messiah, and He was to come, moreover, within the lifetime of the generation to which He had proclaimed the nearness of the Kingdom of God.
The setting up of the Kingdom was to be preceded by the Day of Judgment. In describing the Messianic glory Jesus makes use of the traditional picture, but He does so with modesty, restraint, and sobriety. Therein consists His greatness.
With political expectations this Kingdom has nothing whatever to do. "To hope for the Kingdom of God in the transcendental sense which Jesus attaches to it, and to raise a revolution, are two things as different as fire and water." The transcendental character of the expectation consists precisely in this, that the State and all earthly institutions, conditions, and benefits, as belonging to the present age, shall either not exist at all in the coming Kingdom, or shall exist only in a sublimated form. Hence Jesus cannot preach to men a special ethic of the Kingdom of God, but only an ethic which in this world makes men free from the world and prepared to enter unimpeded into the Kingdom. That is why His ethic is of so completely negative a character; it is, in fact, not so much an ethic as a penitential discipline.
The ministry of Jesus is therefore not in principle different from that of John the Baptist: there can be no question of a founding and development of the Kingdom within the hearts of men. What distinguishes the work of Jesus from that of the Baptist is only His consciousness of being the Messiah. He awoke to this consciousness at His baptism. But the Messiahship which He claims is not a present office; its exercise belongs to the future. On earth He is only a man, a prophet, as in the view implied in the speeches in the Acts of the Apostles. "Son of Man" is therefore, in the passages where it is authentic, a purely eschatological designation of the Messiah, though we cannot tell whether His hearers understood Him as speaking of Himself in His future rank and dignity, or whether they thought of the Son of Man as a being quite distinct from Himself, whose coming He was only proclaiming in advance.
"The sole object of this argument is to prove that the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus, as expressed in the title 'Son of Man,' shares in the transcendental apocalyptic character of Jesus' idea of the Kingdom of God, and cannot be separated from that idea." The only partially correct evaluation of the factors in the problem of the Life of Jesus which Baldensperger had taken over from contemporary theology, and which had hitherto prevented historical science from obtaining a solution of that problem, had now been corrected from the history itself, and it was now only necessary to insert the corrected data into the calculation.
Here is the point at which it is fitting to recall Reimarus. He
