of penitents which is wringing it from God, so that it may now come at any moment.
The eschatological insight of Johannes Weiss made an end of the modern view that Jesus founded the Kingdom. It did away with all activity, as exercised upon the Kingdom of God, and made the part of Jesus purely a waiting one. Now the activity comes back into the preaching of the Kingdom, but this time eschatologically conditioned. The secret of the Kingdom of God which Jesus unveils in the parables about confident expectation in Mark iv., and declares in so many words in the eulogy on the Baptist (Matt. xi.), amounts to this, that in the movement to which the Baptist gave the first impulse, and which still continued, there was an initial fact which was drawing after it the coming of the Kingdom, in a fashion which was miraculous, unintelligible, but unfailingly certain, since the sufficient cause for it lay in the power and purpose of God.
It should be observed that Jesus in these parables, as well as in the related saying at the sending forth of the Twelve, uses the formula, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Mark iv. 23 and Matt. xi. 15) thereby signifying that in this utterance there lies concealed a supernatural knowledge concerning the plans of God, which only those who have ears to hear-that is, the foreordained-can detect. For others these sayings are unintelligible.
If this genuinely "historical" interpretation of the mystery of the Kingdom of God is correct, Jesus must have expected the coming of the Kingdom at harvest time. And that is just what He did expect. It is for that reason that He sends out His disciples to make known in Israel, as speedily as may be, what is about to happen. That in this He is actuated by a dogmatic idea, becomes clear when we notice that, according to Mark, the mission of the Twelve followed immediately on the rejection at Nazareth. The unreceptiveness of the Nazarenes had made no impression upon Him; He was only astonished at their unbelief (Mark vi. 6). This passage is often interpreted to mean that He was astonished to find His miracle-working power fail Him. There is no hint of that in the text. What He is astonished at is, that in His native town there were so few believers, that is, elect, knowing as He does that the Kingdom of God may appear at any moment. But that fact makes no difference whatever to the nearness of the coming of the Kingdom.
The Evangelist, therefore, places the rejection at Nazareth and the mission of the Twelve side by side, simply because he found them in this temporal connexion in the tradition. If he had been working by "association of ideas," he would not have arrived at this order. The want of connexion, the impossibility of applying any natural explanation, is just what is historical, because the course of
