wit and address, but historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology with which he is at feud; he ought to use sober history as his weapon against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seem to find between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical knowledge of his own.
De Jonge knows that Jesus possessed property inherited from His father: "One proof may serve where many might be given-the hasty flight into Egypt with his whole family to escape from Herod, and the long sojourn in that country."
De Jonge knows-he is here, however, following the Gospel of John, to which he everywhere gives the preference-that Jesus was between forty and fifty years old at the time of His first coming forward publicly. The statement in Luke iii. 23, that He was wsei thirty years old, can only mislead those who do not remember that Luke was a portrait painter and only meant that "Jeschua, in consequences of His glorious beauty and His ever-youthful appearance, looked ten years younger than He really was."
De Jonge knows also that Jesus, at the time when He first emerged from obscurity, was a widower and had a little son-the "lad" of John vi. 9, who had the five barley loaves and two fishes, was in fact His son. This and many other things the author finds in "the glorious John." According to De Jonge too we ought to think of Jesus as the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman's blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with "privy-finance-councillor" Zacchaeus.
But this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!
De Jonge's one-sided preference for the Fourth Gospel is shared by Kirchbach's book, "What did Jesus teach?" [1] but here everything, instead of being judaised, is spiritualised. Kirchbach does not seem to have been acquainted with Noack's "History of Jesus," otherwise he would hardly have ventured to repeat the same experiment without the latter's touch of genius and with much less skill and knowledge.
The teaching of Jesus is interpreted on the lines of the Kantian philosophy. The saying, "No man hath seen God at any time," is to be understood as if it were derived from the same system of thought as the "Critique of Pure Reason." Jesus always used the
- ↑ Wolfgang Kirchbach, Was lehrte Jesus? Zicei Urevangelien. Berlin, 1897, 248 pp.; second greatly enlarged and improved edition, 1902, 339 pp. By the same author, Das Buch Jesus. Die Urevangelien. Neu nachgewiesen, new uberstzt, geordnet und aus der Ursprache erklart. (The Book of Jesus. The Primitive Gospels. Newly traced, translated, arranged, and explained on the basis of the original.) Berlin, 1897.
