moreover, to its greatest and most nourishing period? Historically regarded, the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul are simply the culminating manifestations of Jewish apocalyptic thought. The usual representation is the exact converse of the truth. Writers describe Jewish eschatology in order to illustrate the ideas of Jesus. But what is this "Jewish eschatology" after all? It is an eschatology with a great gap in it, because the culminating period, with the documents which relate to it, has been left out. The true historian will describe the eschatology of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul in order to explain Jewish eschatology. It is nothing less than a misfortune for the science of New Testament Theology that no real attempt has hitherto been made to write the history of Jewish eschatology as it really was-that is, with the inclusion of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul. [1]
All this has had to be said in order to justify the apparently self-evident assertion that Mark, Matthew, and Paul are the best sources for the Jewish eschatology of the time of Jesus. They represent a phase which even in detail is self-explanatory, of that Jewish apocalyptic hope which manifested itself from time to time. We are, therefore, justified in first reconstructing the Jewish apocalyptic of the time independently out of these documents, that is to say, in bringing the details of the discourses of Jesus into an eschatological system, and then on the basis of this system endeavouring to explain the apparently disconnected events in the history of His public life.
The lines of connection which run backwards towards the Psalms of Solomon, Enoch, and Daniel, and forwards towards the apocalypses of Baruch and Enoch, are extremely important for the understanding of certain general conceptions. On the other hand, it is impossible to over-emphasise the uniqueness of the point of view from which the eschatology of the time of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul presents itself to us.
In the first place, men feel themselves so close to the coming events that they only see what lies nearest to them, the imaginative development of detail entirely ceases. In the second place, it appears to us as though seen, so to speak, from within, passed through the medium of powerful minds like those of the Baptist and Jesus. That is why it is so great and simple. On the other hand, a certain complication arises from the fact that it now intersects actual history. All these are original features of it, which are not found in the Jewish apocalyptic writings of the preceding and following periods, and that is why these documents
- ↑ Even Baldensperger's book. Die messianisch-apokalyptischen Hoffnungen des Judentums (1903), passes at a stride from the Psalms of Solomon to Fourth Ezra. The coming volume is to deal with the eschatology of Jesus. That is a "theological," but not an historical division of the material. The second volume should properly come in the middle of the first.
