But how was it that the Messianic enthusiasm on the part of the people did not lead to a Messianic controversy, in spite of the fact that Jesus "from the first came forward in Jerusalem as Messiah"? This difficulty O. Holtzmann seems to be trying to provide against when he remarks in a footnote: "We have no evidence that Jesus, even during the last sojourn in Jerusalem, was recognised as Messiah except by those who belonged to the inner circle of disciples. The repetition by the children of the acclamations of the disciples (Matt. xxi. 15 and 16) can hardly be considered of much importance in this connexion." According to this, Jesus entered Jerusalem as Messiah, but except for the disciples and a few children no one recognised His entry as having a Messianic significance! But Mark states that many spread their garments upon the way, and others plucked down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way, and that those that went before and those that followed after, cried "Hosanna!" The Marcan narrative must therefore be kept out of sight for the moment in order that the Life of Jesus as conceived by the modern Marcan hypothesis may not be endangered.
We should not, however, regard the evidence of supernatural knowledge and the self-contradictions of this Life of Jesus as a matter for censure, but rather as a proof of the merits of O. Holtzmann's work. [1]
He has written the last large-scale Life of Jesus, the only one which the Marcan hypothesis has produced, and aims at providing a scientific basis for the assumptions which the general lines of that hypothesis compel him to make; and in
- ↑ Oskar Holtzmann's work. War Jesus Ekstatiker? (Tubingen, 1903, 139 pp.) is in reality a new reading of the life of Jesus. By emphasising the ecstatic element he breaks with the "natural" conception of the life and teaching of Jesus; and, in so far, approaches the eschatological view. But he gives a very wide significance to the term ecstatic, subsuming under it, it might almost be said, all the eschatological thoughts and utterances of Jesus. He explains, for instance, that "the conviction of the approaching destruction of existing conditions is ecstatic." At the same time, the only purpose served by the hypothesis of ecstasy is to enable the author to attribute to Jesus "The belief that in His own work the Kingdom of God was already beginning, and the promise of the Kingdom to individuals; this can only be considered ecstatic." The opposites which Bousset brings together by the conception of paradox are united by Holtzmann by means of the hypothesis of ecstasy. That is, however, to play fast and loose with the meaning of "ecstasy." An ecstasy is, in the usual understanding of the word, an abnormal, transient condition of excitement in which the subject's natural capacity for thought and feeling, and therewith all impressions from without, are suspended, being superseded by an intense mental excitation and activity. Jesus may possibly have been in an ecstatic state at His baptism and at the transfiguration. What O. Holtzmann represents as a kind of permanent ecstatic state is rather an eschatological fixed idea. With eschatology, ecstasy has no essential connexion. It is possible to be eschatologically minded without being an ecstatic, and vice versa. Philo attributes a great importance to ecstasy in his religious life, but he was scarcely, if at all, interested in eschatology.
