His preaching stands in a quite external relation for what was in His mind was rather a fellowship of spiritual men engaged in seeking a higher righteousness. He did not really desire to be the Messiah, and in His inmost heart had renounced the hopes of His people. If He called Himself Messiah, it was in view of a higher Messianic ideal. For the people His acceptance of the Messiahship denoted the supersession of their own very differently coloured expectation. The transcendental events become immanent. In regard to the apocalyptic Judgment of the World, he retains only the sermon preserved by John about the inward and constant process of separation.
Although not to the same extent, Schurer also, in his view of the teaching of Jesus, is strongly influenced by the Fourth Gospel. In an inaugural discourse of 1903[1] he declares that in his opinion there is a certain opposition between Judaism and the preaching of Jesus, since the latter contains something absolutely new. His Messiahship is only the temporally limited expression of a unique, generally ethical, consciousness of being a child of God, which has a certain analogy with the relation of all God's children to their Heavenly Father. The reason for His reserve in regard to His Messiahship was, according to Schurer, Jesus' fear of kindling "political enthusiasm"; from the same motive He repudiates in Mark xii. 37 all claim to be the Messiah of David's line. The ideas of the Messiah and the Kingdom of God at least underwent a transformation in His use of them. If in His earlier preaching He only announces the Kingdom as something future, in His later preaching He emphasises the thought that in its beginnings it is already present.
That it is precisely the representatives of the study of Late Judaism who lift Jesus out of the Late-Jewish world of thought, is not in itself a surprising phenomenon. It is only an expression of the fact that here something new and creative enters into an uncreative age, and of the clear consciousness that this Personality cannot be resolved into a complex of contemporary ideas. The problem of which they are conscious is the same as Bousset's. But the question cannot be avoided whether the violent separation of Jesus from Late Judaism is a real solution, or whether the very essence of Jesus' creative power does not consist, not in taking out one or other of the parts of the eschatological machinery, but in doing what no one had previously done, namely, in setting whole machinery in motion by the application of an ethico-religious motive power. To perceive the unsatisfactoriness of the transformation hypothesis it is only necessary to think of all the
- ↑ Emil Schurer, Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu Christi. (The Messianic Self-consciousness of Jesus Christ.) 1903, 24 pp. According to J. Meinhold, too, in Jesus und das alte Testament (Jesus a Old Testament), 1896, Jesus did not purpose to be the Messiah of Israel.
