As a matter of fact the Life of Jesus of the "Manuscript" [1] is unsatisfactory both scientifically and artistically, just because it aims at being at once scientific and artistic. If only Frenssen, with his strongly life-accepting instinct, which gives to his thinking, at least in his earliest writings where he reveals himself without artificiality, such a wonderful simplicity and force, had dared to read his Jesus boldly from the original records, without following modern historical theology in all its meanderings! He would have been able to force his way through the underwood well enough if only he had been content to break the branches that got in his way, instead of always waiting until some one went in front to disentwine them for him. The dependence to which he surrenders himself is really distressing. In reading almost every paragraph one can tell whether Kai Jans was looking, as he wrote it, into Oskar Holtzmann or P. W. Schmidt or von Soden. Frenssen resigns the dramatic scene of the healing of the blind man at Jericho. Why? Because at this point he was listening to Holtzmann, who proposes to regard the healing of the blind man as only a symbolical representation of the "conversion of Zacchaeus." Frenssen's masters have robbed him of all creative spontaneity. He does not permit himself to discover motifs for himself but confines himself to working over and treating in cruder colours those which he finds in his teachers.
And since he cannot veil his assumptions in the cautious, carefully modulated language of the theologians, the faults of the modern treatment of the life of Jesus appear in him exaggerated an hundredfold. The violent dislocation of narratives from their connexion, and the forcing upon them of a modern interpretation, becomes a mania with the writer and a torture to the reader. The range of knowledge not drawn from the text is infinitely increased. Kai Jans sees Jesus after the temptation cowering beneath the brow of the hill "a poor lonely man torn by fearful doubts, a man in the deepest distress." He knows too that there was often great danger that Jesus would "betray the 'Father in heaven' and go back to His village to take up His handicraft again, but now as a man with a torn and distracted soul and a conscience tortured by the gnawings of remorse."
The pupil is not content, as his teachers had been, merely to make the people sometimes believe in Jesus and sometimes doubt
- ↑ i.e., the MS. Life of Jesus written by Kai Jans, one of the characters of the novel. The wy in which the whole life-experience of this character prepares him for the writing of the Life is strikingly-if not always acceptably-worked out.-TRANSLATOR.
