safely across, he drags the rest over after him. He shows that in and with the titles and expressions borrowed from apocalyptic thought, Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, which were all at bottom so inappropriate to Jesus, early Christianity slipped in again "either the old ideas or new ones misunderstood." In pointing this out he cannot refrain from the customary sigh of regret-these apocalyptic titles and expressions "were from the first a misfortune for the new religion." One may well ask how Wernle has discovered in the preaching of Jesus anything that can be called, historically, a new religion, and what would have become of this new religion apart from its apocalyptic hopes and its apocalyptic dogma? We answer: without its intense eschatological hope the Gospel would have perished from the earth, crushed by the weight of historic catastrophes. But, as it was, by the mighty power of evoking faith which lay in it, eschatology made good in the darkest times Jesus' sayings about the imperishability of His words, and died as soon as these sayings had brought forth new life upon a new soil. Why then make such a complaint against it?
The tragedy does not consist in the modification of primitive Christianity by eschatology, but in the fate of eschatology itself, which has preserved for us all that is most precious in Jesus, but must itself wither, because He died upon the cross with a loud cry, despairing of bringing in the new heaven and the new earth-that is the real tragedy. And not a tragedy to be dismissed with a theologian's sigh, but a liberating and life-giving influence, like every great tragedy. For in its death-pangs eschatology bore to the Greek genius a wonder-child, the mystic, sensuous, Early-Christian doctrine of immortality, and consecrated Christianity as the religion of immortality to take the place of the slowly dying civilisation of the ancient world.
But it if not only those who want to find a way from the preaching of Jesus to early Christianity who are conscious of the peculiar difficulties raised by the recognition of its purely Jewish eschatological character, but also those who wish to reconstruct the connexion backwards from Jesus to Judaism. For example, Wellhausen and Schurer repudiate the results arrived at by the eschatological school, which, on its part, bases itself upon their researches into Late Judaism. Wellhausen, in his "Israelitish and Jewish History,"[1] gives a picture of Jesus which lifts Him out of the Jewish frame altogether. The Kingdom which He desires to found becomes a present spiritual entity. To the Jewish eschatology
- ↑ Israelitische und judische Geschichte, 1st ed., 1894, pp. 163-168; 2nd ed., 1895, pp. 198-204; 3rd ed., 1897; 4th ed., 1901, pp. 380-394. See also his Skizzen (Sketches), pp. 6, 187 ff. See also J. Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Marci, 1903, 2nd ed., 1909; Das Evangelium Matthai, 1904; Das Evangelium Lucae, 1904. Julius Wellhausen, now Professor at Gottingen, was born in 1844 at Hameln.
