was the first, and indeed, before Johannes Weiss, the only writer who recognised and pointed out that the preaching of Jesus was purely eschatological. It is true that his conception of the eschatology was primitive and that he applied it not as a constructive, but as a destructive principle of criticism. But read his statement of the problem "with the signs changed," and with the necessary deduction for the primitive character of the eschatology, and you have the view of Weiss.
Ghillany, too, has a claim to be remembered. When Weiss asserts that the part played by Jesus was not the active role of establishing the Kingdom, but the passive role of waiting for the coming of the Kingdom; and that it was, in a sense, only by the acceptance of His sufferings that He emerged from that passivity; he is only asserting what Ghillany had maintained thirty years before with the same arguments and with the same decisiveness. But Weiss places the assertion on a scientifically unassailable basis.
