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CROWN THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY

VOL. XIV.
BOUSSET'S JESUS

Crown Ubeological Xfbrarg

WORKS ALREADY PUBLISHED

Vol. I.— BABEL AND BIBLE. By Dr
Feiedrich Delitzsch. 5s.
Vol. II.— THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF CHRIST.
An Historical and Critical Essay. By Paul Lobstein.
3s.
Vol. III.— MY STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT.
Confessions of a Preacher. By R. Wimmer. 3s. 6d.
Vol. IV.— LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY. Its
Origin, Nature, and Mission. By Jean Reville. 4s.
Vol. V.— WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? By
Adolf Harnack. 5s.
Vol. VI.— FAITH AND MORALS. By W.
Herrmann. 5s.
Vol. VII.— EARLY HEBREW STORY. A
Study of the Origin, the Value, and the Historical
Background of the Legends of Israel. By John P.
Peters, D.D. 5s.
Vol. VIII.— BIBLE PROBLEMS AND THE
NEW MATERIAL FOR THEIR SOLUTION.
By Prof. T. K. Cheyne, D.Litt., D.D. 5s.
Vol. IX.— THE DOCTRINE OF THE
ATONEMENT AND ITS HISTORICAL EVOLU
TION, and RELIGION AND MODERN CUL
TURE. By the late Aoguste Sabatier. 4s. 6d.
Vol. X.— THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CON
CEPTION OF CHRIST : its Significance and Value
in the History of Religion. By Otto Pfleiderer.
3s. 6d.
Vol. XI.— THE CHILD AND RELIGION.
Eleven Essays by Various Writers. 6s.
Vol. XII.— THE EVOLUTION OF RELI
GION : An Anthropological Study. By L. R.
Farnell, M.A., D.Litt. 55.
Vol. XIII.— THE HISTORY OF EARLY
CHRISTIAN LITERATURE. The Books of the
New Testament. By Baron H. Von Soden. 5s.

JESUS

W. $OUSSET

PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GOTTINGEN
TRANSLATED BY
JANET PENROSE TREVELYAN
EDITED BY
Rev. W. D. MORRISON, LL.D.

NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
LONDON: WILLIAMS & NORGATE
1906

CONTENTS

BOOK I
THE OUTWARD COURSE OF THE LIFE OF JESUS,
AND THE FORMS OF HIS ACTIVITY
PAGES
Chapter I. The Ministry . . . 1-18
Chapter II. The Character of Jesus, and his
Relations with contemporary Rabbinism and
Essenism ....... 19-35
Chapter III. Jesus as Preacher and Healer . 36-58
Chapter IV. Disciples and Opponents . . 59-70

BOOK II
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
Chapter V. The Kingdom of God . . . 71-98
Chapter VI. Jesus' Conception of God . . 99-1 1 6
Chapter VII. The Last Judgment . . 117-129
Chapter VIII. The Moral Teaching of Jesus 130-165

vi Contents BOOK in
THE MYSTERY OF THE PERSON
PAGES
Chapter IX. Jesus and the Messiahship . 166-180
Chapter X. The Son of Man . .181-194
Chapter XI. Conclusion . . . . 195-211

JESUS BOOK I
THE OUTWARD COURSE OF THE LIFE OF JESUS,
AND THE FORMS OF HIS ACTIVITY
CHAPTER I
The Ministry
One small section of the life of Jesus, the
short period of his public activity, is all that
our authorities allow us to survey. Its begin
nings lie plunged in darkness. The accounts
given by Matthew and Luke in the first
chapters of their Gospels belong to the domain
of legend, as is shown by the fact that our
earliest Gospel knows nothing of any such
events, while even the fourth passes them over
in silence. Nor do the reports of these two
Gospels agree in any point, except in the
i i

2 Jesus
single statement that Jesus was born at
Bethlehem. And even here a considerable
discrepancy appears. With Luke the better
historical tradition that Nazareth was in reality
Jesus' native town still makes itself felt ; and
according to his account, therefore, Jesus was
born in Bethlehem in consequence of his
parents' journey thither to be enrolled in the
census of Augustus. Matthew, on the other
hand, assumes as self-evident that Jesus'
parents originally lived in Bethlehem, and
gives express reasons for their migration to
Nazareth a few years later. The two accounts
are absolutely contradictory, and represent
two separate attempts at reconciling the older
tradition that Nazareth was Jesus' birthplace
with the later assumption that, as Messiah, he
must have been born at Bethlehem. Nor is it
possible, by rejecting Matthew's report, to save
that of Luke, on the plea that the latter is
simpler and fresher than Matthew's dogmatic
structure, with its framework of Old Testa
ment prophecies. For the story which Luke

The Ministry 3
takes as the very core of his narrative — the
census under Augustus and the journey of
Jesus' parents to Bethlehem — is full of histori
cal impossibilities. And, above all, the central
point of both accounts is formed by the story of
the miraculous birth, which betrays itself by its
very content to be a piece of dogmatic legend.
It is ignored by our Gospels in the actual body
of their narratives, e.g. when they speak without
reserve of Jesus' brothers and sisters,1 and of
himself as the carpenter's son ; or still more
when they record that Mary, his mother, once
came seeking to fetch her son home, because she
thought he was beside himself.2 Paul not only
knows nothing of this dogma, but witnesses
against it when he speaks of Jesus as "of the
seed of David according to the flesh," 3 or when,
in a passage in which he is emphasising the
fact that in order to redeem us Jesus Christ
became in all respects like unto us, he speaks
of him as "born of a woman."4 Finally, a
1 Mark vi. 3. 2 Mark iii. 21 and 32.
3 Rom. i. 3. * Gal. iv. 4.

4 Jesus
direct contradiction to the idea of the miracu
lous birth is formed by the genealogies both
in Matthew and Luke,1 in which Jesus' descent
from David is proved by reference to the
Davidic origin of Joseph. They must have
arisen before the appearance of the birth-
stories, for through them they lose all meaning
and all object. And it happens that, in a
recently discovered manuscript of an early
Syriac translation, we find Matthew's genealogy
actually ending with the words : " Joseph, to
whom Mary the Virgin was betrothed, begat
Jesus, who is called Messiah."
That our faith loses nothing by the abandon
ment of the dogma of the miraculous birth is
best shown in the person and piety of Paul
the Apostle. No man's faith in Jesus Christ
could have been more fervent, more glowing
than his ; yet he knew nothing of the miracu
lous birth. ^ The mystery of the person of
Jesus does not lie in the manner of its outward
origin. /Nor will the first chapters of Luke,
1 Matt. i. 1-6 ; Luke iii. 23-38.

The Ministry 5
with their wonderful poetic beauty, ever cease
to be full of meaning and value for us, even
though we regard them as pure legend. They
bear within themselves their value for all time.
They are the glittering halo which the poetic
faith of the first community set upon the head
of Jesus. I The forms of that faith are transi
tory, but the faith itself in its inmost essence
still remains : " I bring you tidings of great
joy, for there is born to you this day a
Saviour." J Luke must ever be to us the
writer of the Christmas gospel, whether we
take his narrative as literal truth or as poetic
fairy-tale. Our acquaintance with Jesus begins only
when he has attained the prime of manhood,
at the age of about thirty, and is entering
upon his career of public activity. His
appearance is intimately connected, according
to our tradition, with that of another great
emissary of the Lord to the people of Israel —
John the Baptist. Now who was John the
Baptist? All things considered, we can say,

6 Jesus
in Jesus' own words, that he was a prophet.1
After centuries of drought in .the religious life
of the people, here at last was an apparition
on the old grand scale. A prophet after the
manner of the great prophets of old, he
preached repentance and judgment, and sought
to free his countrymen from their ancient
deep-rooted madness of self-complacency and
self- assurance : " Begin not to say within
yourselves, ' We have Abraham to our father ' :
for I say unto you that God is able of these
stones to raise up children unto Abraham."2
In two respects the figure of John the
Baptist eclipses that of the ancient prophets
and assumes a new and special character.
With none of them did asceticism play so
1 great a part as with him. He made his
appearance in the desert, clad in the scanty
clothing of the desert-dwellers, and eating the
desert food. The business of everyday life
was hateful to him ; he constrained his hearers
to come out into the wilderness, that in the
1 Matt. xi. 9. 2 Luke iii. 8. '

The Ministry 7
stillness of dead nature they might find their
God, whom they had lost among men.
But in addition, John was the originator of a
remarkable novelty — the external religious rite
of baptism. What was the true meaning of
the baptism of John We are now scarcely in a
position to say. In any case, both he and his
hearers attached great importance to it, and
he was known as the Baptist on account of it.
It was the tribute paid by the great John to
the later national piety, now nearing its decay
and inclined to lay an ever-increasing stress
upon external rites and ceremonies of a sacred
or miraculous nature.
That Jesus was directly indicated by John as
Messiah, as the Christian tradition has it, we do
not believe. John prophesied a Messiah who
should come with his winnowing-fan in his
hand and with fire from heaven.1 The appear
ance of Jesus was altogether different from
that of the Messiah whom John expected. It
was only when John lay in prison that the
1 Matt. iii. 11, 12.

8 Jesus
belief dawned in his soul that this might be
" He that cometh," the Messiah.1 But indirectly
his preaching was of great importance to the
entry of Jesus upon the scene. He prepared
the way for Jesus' activity. The movement
which he had called forth was still agitating
the souls of the people with its long after-swell
when Jesus began his ministry.
It is part of the most trustworthy substance
of our tradition that Jesus went to be baptized
by John the Baptist. The fact that the
Christian community objected very early to
the idea that the Sinless One should have
accepted the baptism of the forgiveness of
sins,2 makes it impossible that its members
should ever have invented this incident in
the life of Jesus. Further, a tradition which
we have no reason to distrust, tells us that at
his baptism Jesus had an experience, a vision,
which was the turning-point in his life. He
saw the heavens opened and heard the voice
1 Matt. xi. 2 ff.
2 Matt. iii. 14 f. is an attempt to remove the objection.

The Ministry g
of God ring through his soul : " Thou art my
Son."1 Nor is it psychologically improbable
that after this momentous event the hour of
temptation should have come upon him.2
After the divine voice had filled his whole
being with its mighty sound, the earthly nature
rose up against it and must needs be fought
down to the bitter end.
Thus had Jesus ripened and matured for
his appearance in public. As to the time and
place of that event, we are not wholly without
information. Luke tells us that the preaching
of John took place in the fifteenth year of the
reign of Tiberius Caesar,3 i.e. between the 19th
of August 28 and the 19th of August 29 ; and
since John's career must to all appearance have
been very short, the date of Jesus' baptism
and of the beginning of his ministry cannot
be placed at too great a distance from it.
According to the Gospel of Luke, he was at
that time "about" thirty years of age.4 If,
1 Mark i. 9-11. 2 Mark i. 12-13.
8 Luke iii. 1 . * Luke iii. 23.

io Jesus
as it seems, we are right in assuming that
Jesus was born before the death of Herod
the Great,1 he was actually a little more than
thirty at the time of his first appearance,
for Herod died in the year 4 B.C. ; but, on the
other hand, we are compelled to assign his
birth to the very end of the reign of Herod.
Judasa was now under the direct rule of the
Romans, after the deposition and banishment
in 6 a.d. of Archelaus, son of Herod the
Great. Pontius Pilate held the office of pro
curator (26-36 a.d.), and under him the Jewish
high priest (at this time Caiaphas, 17-35 a.d.),
held a position of some independence. Galilee
was still ruled by a son of Herod the Great,
Antipas, by whom the Baptist was imprisoned
and executed. Jesus entered on his ministry
not in his own home, the little inland hill-
town of Nazareth, lying on the southern slope
of Galilee, but in Capernaum, a city standing
in a narrow plain on the western shore of the
1 Luke i. 5, and cf. the account, though a legendary
one, in Matt. ii. 1 ff.

The Ministry n
Lake of Galilee, shut in on the west by a
mountain ridge. In the first chapter of Mark,1
a vivid picture has survived of his first day's
preaching at Capernaum.
We know nothing definite as to the dura
tion of Jesus' ministry. The narrative of our
first three Evangelists is timeless. Even if
their report is accurate, we are not justified
in concluding from the fact that they record
but one journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, that
/ his activity lasted but a single year. On the
other hand, the chronology of the fourth
Gospel, with its division of Jesus' life accord
ing to the Jewish feasts, is not above suspicion,
and cannot be accepted as it stands. Still, we
cannot assume too long a duration for the
ministry. Jesus' death must be placed not
long after the year 30, since, according to the
fairly unanimous conclusion of investigators,
the conversion of Paul took place at latest in
the middle of the thirties.
We are no longer in a position to reconstruct
1 i. 16-39.

1 2 Jesus
an historical picture of the ministry of Jesus in
Galilee according to its chronological develop
ment, for the narrative of our Gospels, with
its prevailing timelessness and its frequent
arrangement of the words and deeds of Jesus
in a designedly material order, does not provide
the means necessary for such a picture. Only
a few scanty data can be established with
certainty : that his success and the enthusiasm
of the multitude steadily increased at first ;
that he gradually gathered round him a band
of disciples and followers whose devotion was
unbounded, but that then a gradual slackening
of enthusiasm set in, and that towards the end
of his Galilean ministry he saw himself sur
rounded by dangers, which he sought to avoid
by a considerable journey towards the north ;
that his following grew less and less, and
that he deliberately restricted himself to the
instruction of his own disciples. The little
that does introduce some movement into the
record of his life we are left to read between
the lines of the Gospels, rather than that they

The Ministry 13
definitely state it ; and the question is, whether
the inquirers into the life of Jesus have always
been right in their readings. A few separate
scenes recorded by the Evangelists seem to
have been of special importance to the internal
course of his life and teaching, such as, above
all, the solemn confession at Caesarea Philippi,
when Peter answered the Master's question,
" Who say ye that I am ? " with the unhesitat
ing words : "Thou art the Christ."1 Here it
certainly seems as though Jesus were speaking
to his disciples for the first time (and probably
towards the end of his ministry) of the Messi
anic secret of his person, and as though the
confession of the disciples were also made now
for the first time. But our Evangelists leave
us to guess this, while they themselves pass
quickly over the scene without expressing
themselves in any way as to its inward
meaning. Further, it seems probable that
Jesus did not speak to his disciples of his
approaching suffering and death until towards
1 Mark viil. 27 ff.

14 Jesus
the end of his life ; and nothing is more natural
and indeed more necessary than to suppose
that the thought of death arose but slowly in
his mind, in connection with those bitter and
disappointing experiences at the hands of the
people, which we are left to conclude from his
stern judgments upon them. But again, our
Gospels do not state this explicitly, nay, they
even make Jesus speak of his suffering and
death at the very beginning of his ministry.1
In short, wherever it is a question of the
internal course of Jesus' life, we find ourselves
plunged in uncertainties and obliged to be
content with conjectures of a greater or less
degree of probability. On the whole, his life
and teaching flowed on in an even course,
without any strong outward signs of develop
ment, in the grand and simple channels
which he had chosen from the beginning.
Wandering from place to place, preaching,
healing, comforting sinners, attacking the
leaders of the people, gathering a band of
1 Mark ii. 20.

The Ministry 15
disciples, Jesus passed through the cities and
villages of Galilee, until his time was fulfilled.
Then at the end of his life he journeyed
up to Jerusalem — probably for the first time
since the beginning of his ministry proper.
Here also we do not really learn the reason
for the step. The explanation apparently
given by the Gospels is that he went up to
Jerusalem to meet his death. Yet the scene
in Gethsemane argues against this view, for
it shows plainly that to the last he had ad
mitted the possibility that the doom of death
might pass him by. We may probably assume
that Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem under the
dim impulse and consciousness that there his
destiny would be accomplished, in the manner
ordained him by his Father.
From this point onward our records become
fuller ; indeed they follow the events of the
life of Jesus almost from day to day. A series
of well-attested and internally connected in
cidents pass before our eyes : the Messianic
entry into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the

1 6 Jesus
temple, the betrayal of Judas, the last supper
with the disciples, Gethsemane and the arrest,
the trial before the high priest, with Jesus'
confession to the Messiahship,1 the denial of
Peter, the judgment before Pilate, the death of
Jesus on the cross. The scenes follow one
another with catastrophic swiftness, and on the
whole we obtain a good general view. Here
too, however, we often seek in vain for some
insight into the course of events below the
surface. We should give much to know
where to look for the forces at work behind the
catastrophe ; for Jesus' old opponents, the
Scribes and Pharisees, have now disappeared
from the scene. In their place the Jerusalemic
authorities — high priest and council — stand
out as the arch-foes. But what was the cause
of so swift a growth of enmity in these new
1 This scene, in spite of all objections recently raised
against it (e.g. by W. Brandt in his Gesckichte Jesv) has
a kernel of historic truth. We cannot measure the
tumultuous proceedings against Jesus by the standards of
the regular procedure of the Jewish tribunals known to us
from later sources.

The Ministry 17
opponents? Where are the obscure motive
forces to be sought? And what was the
part played in the trial by the Roman
authorities, by Pilate ? Our Gospels are
evidently anxious to throw all the blame upon .
the Jews, and to represent the Roman governor
as half on the side of Jesus, and only borne
along by the unruly proceedings of his accusers
against his own better judgment. But the
question has quite rightly been raised, whether
Pontius Pilate's share in the trial of Jesus, as
it is represented in our Gospels, is really
consistent with the character of this extremely
harsh and bloody governor, to whom a few
executions more or less would be a matter of
no importance ; and whether the Romans did
not perhaps play a far more active part in
the condemnation of Jesus. But whether his
chief accusers were Jews or Gentiles, or a com
bination of both, it is at any rate certain that
Jesus was condemned to death as Messiah and ,
because of his Messianic claims. That Pilate
ordered the words, " This is the King of the

1 8 Jesus
Jews," x to be inscribed on the cross, is a piece
of good evangelic tradition.
Finally, we know that Jesus was put to
death on a Friday. But our Gospel witnesses
differ even as to the date of the fatal day. It
appears certain that our first three Gospels
represent Jesus as suffering crucifixion on the
15th of Nizan,2 while the fourth makes it the
14th.3 No unanimity has yet been reached
among scholars on the question which of these
two dates is the correct one ; but even among
those who usually look upon the Johannine
tradition with the greatest suspicion, there is
now a considerable tendency to give the
preference to it in this one instance. The
attempts to ascertain the year and month of
Jesus' death by astronomical means, i.e. by
calculating in which of the years about 30 the
14th or 15th of Nizan fell on a Friday, have as
yet led to no perfectly definite result.
1 Mark xv. 26.
2 According to Mark xiv. 12, the arrest took place on
the evening of the 14th of Nizan.
3 John xiii. 1 ; xviii. 28 ; xix. 31.

CHAPTER II
The Character of Jesus, and his Relations
with contemporary Rabbinism and Essenism
Our knowledge of Jesus is very small if we
approach our authorities with the desire to
reconstruct the life, or, as we now prefer to
call it, the history of Jesus, according to its
development and its inward connecting links.
We soon find ourselves lost in a maze of
uncertainties and conjectures.
It will be well, therefore, to forego all
attempts at a formal life or history of Jesus.
Yet our knowledge of him is far greater than
the preceding scanty survey would lead us to
suppose. We have only to strike out the
right path, and to ask our questions in the
right way. If we are not in a position to form
19

20 Jesus
a connected picture of the course of Jesus'
career, we can yet realise his figure, thrown
out, as it were, against a flat background ; for
the figure of Jesus is so simple and on such
grand lines, it stands out so complete and so
mature from the first hour of his activity to
the last, that it bears the test of being repre
sented in stationary relief, and does not become
lifeless even when deprived of the clearness
lent by a presentation based on development.
In our attempt at reconstruction we shall
proceed from the outer to the inner, and shall
begin with a sketch of the unchanging external
forms in which the life and activity of Jesus in
Galilee were cast. We shall ask ourselves in
what general manner Jesus set about his task,
with what express aims and objects and by
what means he sought to influence his
hearers, who were his opponents, where he
found his adherents, and how he behaved
towards his friends. And in this way we
shall soon find that we obtain a most vivid and
striking picture of his ministry.

The Character of Jesus 2 1
In considering Jesus' mission as a whole, it
may best be called a prophetic one. It was
not in any <sense expressly Messianic, as we
shall point1 out more clearly below. Perhaps
it was not until his entry into Jerusalem that
Jesus proclaimed himself to the multitude as
Messiah ; certainly it was not until the end of
his sojourn in Galilee that he set his disciples
the Messianic question. To the people he
was "one of the prophets,"1 or else they
placed him on a level with John the Baptist ; 2
their verdict was, " He speaks as one that hath
authority (i.e. as a prophet), and not as the
Scribes."3 Jesus once spoke of himself and
John the Baptist together as the children of
wisdom.4 And indeed we must go back to the
great prophets of the Old Testament before
we find figures on anything approaching the
scale of the Baptist and Jesus. Only with
them do we come upon the same power of
popular speech, the same dreadful earnest in
1 Mark viii. 28. 2 Matt. xi. 28.
3 Mark i. 22. 4 Luke vii. 35.

2 2 Jesus
the preaching of judgment to come, the same
ardour in the struggle against the powers that
be and the idle masses, the saiHg insistence
upon inwardness and truth in worship, the
same grand art of standing alone.
And yet there are certain differences between
the manner of Jesus and that of the ancient
prophets. If the Baptist differed from their
example in one direction,1 Jesus differed in
another. The figure of the Baptist is more
ascetic and anti-worldly, harsher and more
impassioned, than theirs, while the figure of
Jesus is more human and accessible, and
breathes a greater sense of harmony and
peace. Nevertheless we ought not to lay too great
a stress upon this side of Jesus' character.
We run some danger of painting him in
colours too harmonious and peaceful. It is
only recently that we have begun to pay more
attention to the other side of the picture, and
have asked ourselves whether Jesus was not a
1 See p. 6 above.

The Character of Jesus 23
visionary, whether he did not live a large part
of his life in regions beyond those of ordinary
consciousness. We must not forget that once
during his ministry his mother and his brethren
came to fetch him home, thinking he was
"beside himself,"1 and that his opponents
charged him with working his cures by the
power of an evil spirit, Beelzebub.2 Experi
ences of a visionary nature are, moreover, to
be found in his life, though they are not very
frequent. According to the Gospel tradition,
his baptismal vision at the outset of his
ministry brought him to a final decision con
cerning himself and his task. And after it, as
our Gospels relate, the Spirit drove him into
the wilderness, where he was tempted of the
devil. Once he himself tells his disciples that
he had beheld Satan "fallen as lightning from5
heaven."3 If we can trust the reports of the
transfiguration given by our Gospels, he even
included his disciples in his other-worldly
experiences. Nor must we forget his agony
1 Mark iii. 21, 35. 2 Mark iii. 22. 3 Luke x. 18.

24 Jesus
of prayer in Gethsemane, when, as Luke tells
us, he wrestled so earnestly that the sweat
stood out upon his forehead like drops of
blood, nor his repeated flights into the
wilderness, nor the violent agitations of soul
which seized him, especially when healing or
performing his "mighty works," nor his
sudden outbursts of wrath, nor the many
incidents in his life in which he seems to be
acting under the influence of some obscure,
inexplicable storm and stress,1 nor the over-.
mastering force with which he made his
strangely severe moral demands, nor the
ardent confidence with which he announced
the nearness of the wonderful Kingdom. In
deed it could not have been otherwise. We
must realise the fact once for all, that the life of
the greatest in God's Kingdom does not move
in the sober light of every day, but that a
large part of it lies in regions to us mysterious
and unfamiliar. Fearful and irresistible forces
rule in its depths, vast possibilities arise, a new
1 Mark i. 3,5, 38 ; vi. 31, 45 ; x. 32.

The Character of Jesus 25
world stirs within it and strives towards the
surface with the pangs of travail. The devil
and his demons wrestle with the angels of
God, mortal despair alternates with a heavenly
confidence of victory, night struggles with
day, the clouds descend, but between their
rifts are seen the rays of the brightening stars.
Then when a flash from this innermost life
touches our souls, when its depths are stirred
and rise up with volcanic force, we stand
amazed and begin dimly to conceive the
terrible inward greatness of such a soul-life.
So it was with Jesus.
Yet the reverse side of that life was greater
still. As Paul once said, "Whether we are
beside ourselves, it is unto God ; or whether
we are of sober mind, it is unto you,"1 and
there lies the great secret of the moral force ,
of Jesus' life. Again and again he knew how>
to curb the mighty forces that wrestled within
his soul for the benefit of his fellow-men. If
he yearned to kindle a consuming fire, he
1 2 Cor. v. 13.

26 Jesus
knew also what its destructive power would
be ; he could forbear, and he laid no im
possible or unnecessary burdens on the souls
of his disciples. The burdens which must
needs be borne after the parting of the ways
to which he brought his followers were heavy
enough. Thus it happens that the impression
of calmness and certainty, of kindness, peace,
i and spiritual harmony is still the strongest in
our total picture of Jesus. When we compare
his personality with that of Paul, his life with
that of the earliest Christian community, it is
astonishing how little we hear in it of "the
Spirit," that bringer of all the stormy, super
natural excitements and the miraculous powers
of the first community-life. The visionary
element likewise plays but a small part in the
reports of our Gospels. Of Jesus' wrestlings
in the wilderness we are told practically
nothing — merely the bare fact that he went
into the wilderness. In short, we are left
with the idea that a far mightier storm and
stress was at work in his soul than he ever

The Character of Jesus 27
allowed to penetrate to the surface. It is
significant that the multitude clearly grasped
the difference in this respect between Jesus
and the Baptist. Whereas the Baptist gave
the impression of a man possessed by a
higher power, Jesus appeared by comparison
as an ordinary, everyday person : " Behold a
gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend
of publicans and sinners."1 It is when we
contrast these two figures that, beside the
agitated and stormful presence of the Baptist,
the personality of Jesus stands out in greater
simplicity, measure, and harmony, and with a
kindlier inclination towards the workaday
life of men.
Even when we compare Jesus with the
prophets of the Old Testament, the same
difference becomes apparent. In contrast
with them, how homely, how true to human ;
life, is the figure of Jesus ! Where among
those dark, tremendous personages do we find
features so sunny or so purely human as with
1 Matt. xi. 19.

28 Jesus
Jesus ? Where do we read of a prophet who
called the children to him in the street and
fondled them? Jesus' heart warmed to the
children, to the sunshine in their eyes and the
magic of the spring in their hearts, no less
than to the birds of the air and the flowers
of the field ; he loved to go down into the
quiet and happiness of the people's homes ; he
would let Martha go busily about her house
hold work while Mary sat listening at his feet,
and he rejoiced with the joyous at weddings
and festivals. The prophets moved along the
lofty walks of life, amid world-famous events,
the struggles of the great, and the intrigues
of palaces r they were the counsellors of kings,
and lived far removed from the multitude.
Jesus, on the other hand, spent his life among
common men, in the midst of the crowd, in
constant intercourse with the lower strata of
the people, mixing with simple folk in all
their everyday aspects ; and hence the charm
of infinite wealth and infinite many-sidedness
encircles him.

The Character of Jesus 29
Yet we must not forget that both sides of
the character of Jesus were fused in one.
However ordinary the circumstances, Jesus
himself is never ordinary. Like the sun,
which sheds its gentle warmth upon the earth
and yet remains the sun, clothed in unique
beauty, overwhelming force and raging heat,
the least part of which would suffice to con
sume the life it created, so does Jesus appear
among his surroundings. When we look
deeper into his life, we see both the mighty
motive forces below the surface and the heroic
moral strength with which they were held
down. This indeed is where we find him
greatest — in his restrained strength, his pent-
up wealth, his calmness in the midst of storm,
the harmony he produces from the most jarring
discords.^When we examine the personal activity of
Jesus more closely, in the light of the forms it
borrowed from his times, it can be said that
he added to the prophetic manner — which was
the deepest note of his being — something of

30 Jesus
the best in the rabbinic learning of his day.
Strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless
true that Jesus bears some resemblance to his
bitterest opponents in the manner of his
teaching. Even a superficial glance shows
much that is akin. His preaching in the
synagogue, his disputations and expounding
of the Scriptures, his wandering from place to
place and gathering of disciples — these were
also the principal forms in which the lives of
the famous Rabbis of his day were cast. Even
his practice of healing and casting out of
devils can be traced among them. And we
shall see later on that he owed the vehicle on
which he mainly relied in his popular preach
ing—the parable — more particularly to the
synagogue and the Scribes. As the Rabbis
taught their disciples first and foremost how
to pray, so Jesus' disciples came to him with
the petition, " Lord, teach us to pray." J Like
the Rabbis, Jesus is addressed by his disciples
and followers as " Lord," " Rabbi," " Master,"
1 Luke xi. 1.

Relations with Rabbinism 31
" Teacher." As they were frequently supported
by their pupils — although this was not the rule,
and many regulations existed against it, exhort
ing them to live on the produce of their labour
and to teach the law for nothing — so Jesus,
and even his disciples too, depended for their
support on the resources of their followers.
But his connections with rabbinism were
not of an external or even antagonistic nature
only ; rather the web of his teaching is crossed
and recrossed with spiritual threads from the
rabbinic woof. Moreover, a new and not
strictly prophetic element associated with his
ordinary manner — the pedagogic — originates
with them. Some writers have thought it
necessary to dispute the pedagogic element in
Jesus altogether, in favour of his intuitive,
prophetic manner. And indeed there is no
doubt that too much stress has often been laid
on the calmly instructive and edifying side
of Jesus' personality. Certainly he was no
ordinary sort of pedagogue, and pedagogy was
not all in all to him. He was never known

32 Jesus
to suppress a truth or to make present sacrifice
of a final end for pedagogic reasons. He
wished to cast fire upon the earth, " and would
that it were already kindled ! " 1 He did not
gradually lift his disciples to higher levels, but
set them immediately before a stern alterna
tive ; he was more inclined to repel the multi
tude than to sue for its favour ; 2 he did
not argue with his opponents : he annihilated
them. The spirit that would " compass sea
and land to make one proselyte," 3 with all its
equivocations and compromises, he utterly
abhorred. He could speak harsh, biting words,
which were apt to offend and wound his hearers,
and the meaning of which was only to be won
by hard mental effort ; and he was fond of
exhibiting things in all their forbidding harsh
ness, one-sidedness, and crudity. Who can
reproach him for it? A prophet cannot
always be a pedagogue as well. Yet when all
1 Luke xii. 50. (The above is a literal translation of the
German version. — Trans.)
2 Luke xiv, 25 if.
3 Matt, xxiii. 15.

Relations with Essenism 33
is said and done, Jesus was a pedagogue within
the limits set him by his prophetic calling.
We have only to remember how large a part
was played in his public ministry by plain,
homely teaching, and how in his parables he
cares only for what is simple, clear, and didactic.
Where among the prophets of the Old Testa
ment does the personal intercourse with the
disciples, the gradual pouring out of the riches
of the soul into the souls of others, play so
great a part as with Jesus ? The work of the
prophets ended with their lives, or at most the
memory and influence of the Master was kept
alive for a short time by a few followers. But
when Jesus was no more, a band of disciples i
remained, ready and able to carry on the great
work of their Master with energy and courage.
Attempts have often been made to establish
a relation between Jesus and the remarkable
society of pietists who are known under the
name of Essenes, and who enjoyed a very high
consideration at the time of which we are
speaking. Like them, it is urged, Jesus for-
3

34 Jesus
bade the swearing of oaths. Starting from
this fact, it is sought to prove that Jesus de
voted all his energies to the gathering of
disciples, and that he founded an order in the
manner of the Essenic order, while above all
the absolute prohibition laid upon the inner
circle of his disciples to possess property is
adduced as a parallel. We must, however,
entirely reject any proposal to estabUsh a
connection between them. Jesus had nothing
whatever to do with the sect of the Essenes.
Essenism was an anti-worldly monachism, and
its chief features were an intense exclusiveness,
a withdrawal from the world, and a renuncia
tion of all active effect upon it. What part
or lot had Jesus with those strange anchorites
who made it a rule that, if one of their number
happened to meet any person not belonging to
the order, or even an initiated novice, he
must immediately take a cleansing bath,
because he had defiled himself! What was
there in common between Jesus' eager desire
to work while he had the light, between his

Relations with Essenism 35
joy in labour, and the cloister-like retirement
of the Essenic sect ? There is, moreover, yet
another consideration. The Essenic order
was a sacramental community, and the main
features of its pietism consisted in mystic rites,
consecrations, bathings, and common meals of
a sacrificial nature. Now Jesus is absolutely
free from such tendencies ; everything in his
teaching is directed towards the spiritual and ;
the personal. He did not baptize as John had
done ; the Christian baptism was the creation \
of the community he left behind him. And
if, on the last evening of his life, he gave his j
disciples bread and wine as his body and blood, I
it is most improbable that he meant thereby,
to institute a regular rite.1 Whatever his
exact object was in gathering his band of
disciples, he certainly did not intend thereby
to create a monastic order. The difference is
complete both in form and in spiritual content,
and the few superficial resemblances which do
exist cannot possibly affect this judgment.
1 See below, p. 109.

CHAPTER III
Jesus as Preacher and Healer
The greater part of Jesus' activity was spent
in teaching and preaching. His first appear
ance in Galilee was made as a popular preacher.
Any place would serve his purpose. He would
often use the synagogue, but did not, like the
Scribes, confine himself to it. Rather he
preached in the streets and squares, in the
houses themselves and in the open air, on
the slope of a mountain or from a boat on
the lake. Only the rabbinic schools and their
disputations — if indeed these played any part
at all in Galilee — he entirely avoided. And
wherever he appeared, the multitude crowded
round the wonderful man, pouring in from
afar and following him for many a league.
36

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 37
He had but to show himself, and the people
came ; when he went into the wilderness,
multitudes followed in his train.
Now, wherein lay the strange and mysterious
power of his discourse? Its form we may
regard as a mixture between the early
prophets' preaching of repentance and the
mode of teaching adopted by the Scribes.
Jesus combined the best points of both.
From the former he took its fire and energy,
its earnestness, and its insistence upon essen
tials ; from the latter the calmer didactic tone,
1 i ' the " pedagogic " element, the wealth and
variety of treatment, the attention paid to
the everyday questions of religious and moral
life. Yet what the people were mainly con
scious of was the difference between his
manner and the accustomed ways of their
former teachers : " He ' speaks as one that
hath authority, and not as the Scribes."
What they heard from the Scribes was in
truth but Scripture-learning. Everything
turned upon the letter of the law and its

3 8 Jesus
exegesis. The merely legal and ceremonial
side, with its mass of ordinances, occupied
by far the largest space in it. Much
that was good and useful for religion and
morals was no doubt let fall by the way, but
only by the way — it could not be enjoyed to
the full. Trained acumen, a system of ex
plaining separate passages of Scripture by the
most artificial rules, idle, fantastic combina
tions, devices of greater or less ingenuity,
punning interpretations and burlesque anec
dotes — these were the characteristics of the
rabbinic discourses. Jesus' attitude towards
the Scriptures was in theory no other than
that of his contemporaries. He too bowed
to the authority of that which was " written,"
usually with unqualified homage, and again
and again he proved his point, especially in
arguing with opponents, by appealing to the
letter of the Scriptures.1 But with him the
Scriptures and the law were never an end in
themselves, but only a means to an end ; his
1 Mark xii. 26 ff. ; xii. 36.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 39
business was, not to expound the Scriptures,
but to lead men to the living God. What
ever he could make use of for that purpose
he took from the Scriptures ; whatever was
useless simply glanced aside from his large
ness of soul and his devotion to the real.
Certainly the Scriptures had authority for him,
but when there was no other way he would
sometimes, if only half consciously, break
through its limits ; and in that case he was
fond of setting passage against passage,
authority against authority.1 But just as
he saw authority in the Scriptures, so he sub
mitted with equal earnestness and humility
to the laws of God as he read them in nature
and in the life of man.
Here, then, lay the difference. The message .
he brought was a living reality, not a clinging ,
to the skirts of a vanished world ; it was religion \
here and now. He himself had something
to say ; he himself, his own person with its
inexhaustible mines of wealth, was to be
1 Mark x. I ff.

40 Jesus
found in his discourses. The message he
brought was the living God, with His good
ness and faithfulness, His deep, holy will
and His gracious promises. Here was no
place for conceits and word-plays, here was
i no straining after effect ; what Jesus brought
was soul-refreshing earnestness and intense
keenness of purpose, never an idle drifting
into futile cleverness.
Being so much in earnest with the matter,
he had the manner at command in an unique
degree. Let us take a somewhat closer view
of the forms which he employed. Their
characteristic feature is universally felt to be
the parable. Among the sayings of Jesus
which have come down to us, the parables
take the first place both in bulk and in im
portance. But even where his discourse
does not take the form of the connected
parable, it is studded with similes and images.
The Gospels themselves lay stress on his
"speaking in parables." The word parable
(maschal) was used at that time to denote

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 41
all the various forms of pictorial and even of
enigmatical speech, and included the parable
proper, the strictly didactic simile, the riddle
and the " dark saying," the form which we
should call paradox,1 the fable, the symbol
ising narrative, and the allegory. That from
among all these forms Jesus selected one —
the didactic parable — almost exclusively, is a
sign of his deepest nature, for his parables
almost always served an eminently practical
purpose. His desire was to teach, not to ask
riddles or to make ingenious puns and witti
cisms in order to arouse a superficial interest.
And he attains his purpose by means of the
simile. When he wishes to bring home to
his hearers some divine idea that he has to
proclaim, he tells a simple story of everyday
life, or dwells on some process of nature
familiar to his audience. He leaves them to
discover the idea behind the parable, which is
always simple and easy to deduce. Thus
1 In Mark vii. 17 a saying of Jesus is termed parabole
(masehal), where we should actually use the word paradox.

42 Jesus
the parable becomes the bridge by which he
leads his hearers out of the world of familiar,
trivial occurrences into the eternal world of
God and God's thought, out of the realm of
nature into the realm of the spirit. A
moment ago they were still there ; now with
but slight effort they have made the crossing.
Jesus takes his hearers as they are, plain men
and women toiling in the common dust and
fulfilling their everyday tasks, — but in the
midst of this life of theirs, in the midst of
the world they know so well, he makes the
great thoughts of God flash into their ken.
Nothing could be more preposterous than
the statement of Mark,1 and following him
of the other Evangelists, that Jesus spoke in
parables in order that the hearts of the people
should be hardened. That is the dogmatic
pedantry of a later age, which serves no
purpose and only obscures the clear image
of Jesus. It is amply contradicted by his
unmistakable tone throughout the parables.
1 Mark iv. 1 1 ff.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 43
This form of address Jesus likewise owed
to the rabbinic learning of his day. There
can be no doubt that he first learnt such a
manner of teaching in the synagogue. All
that has come down to us in the way of
parables from the rabbinic tradition — later
though they undoubtedly are — bears so close a
resemblance both in form and matter to the
parables of Jesus, that no idea of accident can
be entertained. And since any mfluence of
Jesus upon the later Jewish rabbinism is out
of the question, we can only assume that Jesus
had caught the form of his parabolic speech
from the Scribes in the synagogue. This is
not in any sense to disparage him. For it is
precisely in comparing his parables with those
which are most akin to them that the un
exampled mastery with which Jesus handled
this form of teaching is shown. The fact that
in the rabbinic parables practically no use is
made of nature and her doings is in itself
remarkable ; whereas the wealth and freedom
of Jesus' method is most noticeable in the way

44 Jesus
in which he, a son of the people brought up
far from the schools of the Scribes, steeped
his parables in the world of nature. But the
main difference is the same here as before.
In the one case we have mere exposition of
the Scriptures, in the other a living piety.
There the parables are designed to illustrate
the distorted ideas of a dead learning, and
therefore often — though by no means always —
themselves become distorted and artificial.
Here the parable was handled by one whose
whole soul was set, clearly and simply and
with nothing to impede its vision, upon the
real. Thus Jesus was and remains master
of the parable. He spoke ; the others
stammered. In his parables Jesus becomes an
artist; like the truest and greatest artists, he
had the faculty of seeing things as they were,
in all their wealth and variety; he discerned
in them whatever had meaning and could serve
as an example, and he had the gift of putting
what he saw into simple and yet perfect shape.
And so he created his work of art, the parable.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 45
\
But all this he turned to the practical
end of awakening and instructing the people.
1
As he handled the parabolic form with artistic
freedom and independence, so all other means
towards this end lent themselves to his use.
He could strike any note ; he knew how to
convince the brain by quiet persuasion and
instruction, or how to bring heavenly, con
solation to those oppressed by the burden of
existence ; he could string his words to a steely
energy when his object was to awaken moral
heroism, or he could let them flash forth in
passionate wrath when he had to annihilate an
adversary. Not even humour did he lack ; *
satire and irony 2 he seldom made use of, but
he was fond of expressing his meaning with
paradoxical sharpness.3 He always used the
right word at the right place, and never mis-
1 Matt. xi. 16 ff., Mark vii. 19; there is humour in the
parable of the unjust steward, perhaps also in Luke xiv. 7 ff.
2 In Matt. v. 22, his imitation of the language and tone of
the Pharisees' petty casuistry is ironical ; cf. Luke xi. 47.
3 A better understanding of some of the sharpest and
most daring sayings of Jesus is obtained when we grasp

46 Jesus
took his means. And behind the perfected
form of his discourse, there stood ever the
mighty force of actuality which dominated the
hearts of his hearers.
Side by side with his labour of teaching,
the Gospels place his activity as a healer.
" He taught and healed." It is significant of
his ways and methods that he directed his
attention and his efforts not to the spiritual
alone. His heart was wrung by the physical
needs of the people also, and in his eyes the
physical and the spiritual were inextricably
intermingled. He was in fact not so hyper-
spiritual as his admirers would often have him
to be. On the other hand, he was no social
reformer. In his own wandering life of
scarcity and self-denial, he had found poverty
to be no great evil ; rather he regarded wealth
as such. But wherever he came across real
distress, he was ready to help ; wherever he
the fact that they are consciously one-sided or paradoxical,
e.g. Matt. v. 17, 29 f., 34, 39 f . ; Mark vii. 15, 18 ff. ;
Luke xiv. 26 ; Mark x. 24 ff., and so forth.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 47
met with illness and infirmity, he was ready to
heal. Jesus may be regarded as exceptionally
successful in his healing. The art of medicine
was at that time in its earliest infancy, at any
rate in the corner of the world where Jesus
lived. No one had any conception of what
was practicable or impracticable within its field.
The physician pursued his craft with all manner
of remedies, possible and impossible, good and
bad, sometimes by proper means, more often
with all the devices of quackery, faith-healing
and magic, with utterings of the mysterious
name of God, and even by the religious method
of prayer. Jesus made use of religious and
spiritual means alone. He spoke the healing
word to the sick man, took him by the hand
or laid his hand upon him ; that was all. Only
1
rarely does the tradition record his using any
other means.1 His method of healing may
be called a psychical one ; he stirred the forces
of the inner life so powerfully that they reacted
upon the outward bodily life. He healed the
1 E.g. Mark vii. 32 ff. ; viii. 22 ff.

48 Jesus
sick by his immovable faith in his heavenly
Father and the divine force working in him,
and by awakening in the maimed and suffering
the same faith in himself as the messenger of
God. Thus his healing activity lies entirely
within the bounds of what is psychologically
conceivable, and this feature of the life of
Jesus has nothing absolutely unique about it.
The history of religion offers countless analogies
to it down to the most recent times : we need
only mention the cases of astonishing and
undeniable healing which attended the pilgrim
ages to Lourdes, or the miracle- and prayer-
healings of Blumhardt in Bad Boll. In these
cases modern science speaks of the remarkable
phenomena of suggestion, auto-suggestion,1
and hypnotism ; and in view of these analogies
it will at any rate be well to draw the limits
of the possible very widely with regard to our
Gospel stories. We have to consider the
peculiarly powerful impression which the person
of Jesus was in a position to make, the almost
1 Mark v. 25 is a clear case of auto-suggestion.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 49
incalculable force of the people's confidence
in this ever-successful doctor, and the childish
ness and naivete" of the population, which as
yet made no speculations as to the limits
of the possible and entertained no suspicion
of the miraculous, and could therefore attain
to the very verge of what was possible by
the mere force of its confidence.
Nevertheless the limitations and the psycho
logical conditions of Jesus' healing power may
clearly be perceived even from the Gospel
records. Where Jesus found no faith, he
could effect no cures.1 It is especially remark
able that among his miracles one particular
class is brought forward again and again — the
healing of demoniacs. Now in these demoniacs
we recognise with perfect clearness the
mentally unsound. We can even detect the
individual forms of madness or of nervous
derangement in the different stories : e.g.
delirium in Mark v. 2 ff., catalepsy in Matt.
xii. 22, epilepsy in Mark ix. 17 ff. The popular
1 Mark vi. 5 ff. 4

50 Jesus
imagination referred the mysterious and inex
plicable phenomena pertaining to these diseases
to the direct agency of evil spirits or demons,
by whom the sick man was said to be possessed ;
and Jesus, who was quite a son of his time
with regard to these outward ideas, shared their
belief. He cast out the demons by whom the
sick were possessed. What actually made itself
felt, however, through these naive conceptions,
held by Jesus and his patients alike, was the
healing and soothing influence of his extra
ordinary force of soul, with the confidence of
victory which it imparted. It was here, where
the widest scope was given for the exercise of
spiritual and personal influence, that Jesus'
success in healing was evidently greatest. And
even if he attained no permanent results with
many of these poor sufferers, he yet succeeded
very often in producing a temporary calm in
their mental condition. Many of his healings
were probably such cases of temporary cure,
which were then followed by still more violent
relapses. In such a case it was said that.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 51
though the demon had been driven out, he
had returned with others worse than himself.
Jesus' parable of the returning devil probably
refers to such experiences as these, which
had happened to him in the course of his
healings.1 Jesus himself attached great value to his
healing art. The casting out of demons was
to him a clear sign of the immediate nearness
of the Kingdom of God, which was to begin
with the vanquishing of Satan and the evil
spirits.2 When the messengers sent by the
Baptist asked him whether he were "He
that cometh," he pointed in reply to his
miraculous healings.3 They were to him the
proof of the actual presence of the blessed
new age, in which all misery and want would
disappear. He cried woe to the cities of
Chorazin and Bethsaida,4 because they had
not believed in spite of all his signs and
wonders. Yet he never regarded his miracles
1 Matt. xii. 43-45. 2 Matt. xii. 28.
3 Matt. xi. 2 ff. 4 Matt. xi. 20 ff.

52 Jesus
as anything absolutely unique, or as in them
selves sufficient to confirm him in the eyes of
the multitude as the heaven-sent Messiah. He
mentions it quite as a matter of course that
the " sons of the Pharisees " cast out devils.1
When the multitude asked him for a " sign,"
evidently, that is, for some quite abnormal
miracle by which his Messiahship should be
so fully established that not even the dullest
apprehension could deny it longer, he in
dignantly refused their demand.2 He himself
looked upon his miracles as a sure sign for
those who already believed — " If they hear
not Moses and the prophets, neither will they
be persuaded if one rise from the dead." 3 And
when his disciples returned to him with joy,
after they had succeeded in casting out demons,
he told them that they should not rejoice that
the demons were subject to them so much as
that their names were written in heaven. In
short, Jesus suppressed all enthusiasm on the
1 Matt. xii. 27. 2 Mark viii. 1 1 f. ; Matt. xii. 38 f.
3 Luke xvi. 31.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 53
part of the miracle-hunters by his own strong
inwardness and spiritual energy.
Then, as we know, our Gospel tradition
transformed Jesus into a miracle- worker in the
absolute and special sense. In the Gospels
he has become the supernatural Son of
God, who interferes directly, and through no
psychological medium, with the course of
physical life ; raises the dead, walks upon the
sea, commands the winds and the waves, and
feeds thousands with a few loaves of bread ;
for whom in fact no limits to the possible
exist. The devout community traced the!
simple outline of the human Jesus upon the
gold background of the miraculous. Yet the -
outline is still relatively easy to detach from
the background, for on a closer examination
we may observe that the vast majority of the
so-called miracle-stories of the life of Jesus lie
actually within the limits of the psychologically
conceivable, while with others the historical j<
element lies immediately below the surface/
and can be discovered by the removal of a

54 Jesus
few touches added by tradition. There are in
fact but a very few stories which record an
absolutely miraculous and impossible event,
or one for which no analogy can be found.
These few must then be cast aside as the mere
outgrowths of legend. But in the miracle-
stories which occupy so large a space in the
Gospels, a distinctly historical kernel remains.
They express one whole side of the life of
Jesus, and an infinitely attractive one. Jesus
grieved for the physical as well as the spiritual
need of his people. He taught and healed.
Let us look once more at the picture of Jesus
as the successful physician, and consider how
the simple folk must have welcomed this
saviour in direst misery, and with what
infinite trust they must have hung around
him. Wherever he came, courage that had
seemed hopeless revived, tired eyes grew bright,
tired hands and arms were stretched out to
him. Surely he was all-powerful, surely
nothing would be impossible to him. All
needs, both of body and soul, were brought to

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 55
him for his healing touch. All day he was
surrounded by the cry of pain and fear, by
overwhelming trust and longing for help, by
stammering prayers, rejoicings, tears of joy
and of gratitude. And he healed all who
came, so far as he was able, until exhaustion
conquered him.
Meanwhile it must not be forgotten that
Jesus lived and worked among his own people,
and within the limits of Israel. The Gentiles
did not at first come into consideration at all.
He felt that he was sent to the lost sheep of.
the house of Israel,1 and he directed his efforts
upon the people as a whole. Nor did he
mean to found in the band of disciples whom
he gathered round him an order living apart
from the people, a sect or a community. He 1
meant to win the people of Israel to their
God. With infinite patience he set tb work
upon the whole body of the people. " O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I
have gathered thy children together ! " 2 In
1 Matt. xv. 24. 2 Matt, xxiii. 37.

56 Jesus
the parable of the unfruitful fig-tree he
symbolised his own faithful toil for the people
in the figure of the vine-dresser.1 He bore
with the multitude untiringly, and could look
down with kindly indulgence upon this mob
of children who would not be guided by their
Master, but considered that their heaven-sent
leaders ought to be exactly what they them
selves would have them be.2 It is true that
in the long run he could not blind himself to
the impression that his labour with the masses
was on the whole in vain. Not only the
influential leaders of the people, the priests
and Levites, the Scribes and the " rich men,"
had held themselves aloof from him and had
now gone oVer to the party of open antagonism
and bitter hostility. Even the masses, who
had at first welcomed him with such bound
less enthusiasm, he felt to be now slipping
gradually from his hold. His judgments grow
sharper and sharper upon the frivolous multi
tude, engrossed in the sensuous and the
1 Luke xiii. 6-9. 2 Matt. xi. 16 ff.

Jesus as Preacher and Healer 57
external, marching step by step to meet their
ruin ; gloomier and gloomier his prophecies
of their future and their destiny.1 Yet for all
that he did not allow himself to be diverted
from his task. He remained true to his
people to the very end. Even in his last days
he did not relax his attempts to stir the masses
by his public actions. He made his entry
into Jerusalem, and allowed himself to be
acclaimed as Messiah. With his old impetu
ous energy he vehemently denounced the
abuses in the Temple, and placed himself in
the centre of public interest. He never even
thought of transferring his activity to another
sphere, and it was only reluctantly that he
allowed a cure to be wrung from him in a
Gentile country.2 He forbade his disciples to
enter the streets of the Gentiles or the cities
of the Samaritans ; never did he give a direct
command to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles.3
1 See below, pp. 90 f. 2 Matt. xv. 21 f.
3 Matt. x. 5. The command to "baptize all nations," in
Matt, xxviii. 18 f., does not pretend to come from the
"historical" Jesus even in the tradition. The prophecy

58 J

esus
Indeed it is only on this assumption that we
can explain the hesitating and unsympathetic
attitude — to say the least — which the disciples
afterwards maintained towards Paul's mission
to the Gentiles.1 Jesus never spoke more
than dimly of a time in which the Gentiles
also should enter the Kingdom of God.2 Both
in deed and in thought he remained true to
his own people.
of Mark xiii. 1 0 is proved by the mere disturbance of the
context to be a palpable interpolation ; cf. the parallel in
Luke xxi. 12 ff., where the words are absent.
1 Gal. ii. 9, H ff 2 See below, Chap. V.

CHAPTER IV
Disciples and Opponents
The result of these outward conditions neces
sarily was that, towards the end of his life, Jesus
concentrated his personal efforts more and
more upon his disciples. Here we have another
most important feature of the life of Jesus :
the fact that he gathered disciples round him.
From among the total number of them an
inner circle of followers was especially marked
off, who came to be known later as the Twelve.
Whether Jesus really chose twelve disciples at
a particular moment in his life, as the Gospel
tradition asserts, is an open question. Against
such an assumption we have the fact that the
Apostles' disciples show a certain divergence
59

60 Jesus
as to the names of these twelve.1 Also, it may
be doubted whether we ought to credit Jesus
with so mechanical a proceeding as a selection
determined by a sacred number. But the fact
remains that a select band of disciples did
gather round Jesus. The persons who com
posed it may partially have varied, and Jesus
often appears to be attended by a still smaller
circle, such as the faithful three, Peter, James,
and John. It is possible that at the end of
his life he was accidentally accompanied by
exactly twelve adherents. And thus the
Gospel tradition might have arisen.
Now what was Jesus' object in collecting
his band of disciples ? Not, at any rate, to
found a community or church. The com
munity of the followers of Jesus did not arise
until after his death. There is, indeed, scarcely
room for any other hypothesis than that Jesus
wished to create out of his inner ring of
disciples a picked body of missionaries, or
1 See the lists of the apostles in Mark iii. 16-19 ; Matt.
x. 2 f. ; Luke vi. 14-16 ; Acts i. 13 ; and cf. John i. 43-49.

Disciples and Opponents 61
wandering preachers, through whom he hoped
to give a wider circulation and a greater
emphasis to his message of repentance and of
the nearness of the Kingdom of God. Once,
indeed, according to the Gospel record, Jesus
did actually send his disciples forth, with the
command to preach the coming of the King
dom, and to teach and heal as he himself had
done.1 It is true that this report appears in
the Gospels as a detached episode, without any
connection with the rest of the narrative. It
is a measure which on the one hand has no '-
preparation or foundation, and on the other no
consequences whatever. It makes a casual
appearance, and vanishes equally swiftly ;
possibly it represents an attempt which, in face
of the growing hopelessness of his position and
his work, Jesus gave up as suddenly as he had
undertaken it.
In any case, since the time of Paul, the
Christian tradition has been unanimous on one
point: that the inner band of disciples felt
1 Mark vi. 7 ff

62 Jesus
themselves from the outset to be missionaries,
and believed themselves to have been prepared
and instructed by Jesus for that purpose.
Hence it was that from these disciples Jesus
demanded everything. To them he put the
great alternative. He tore them away from
family, wife, calling, home ; he asked that they
should forsake all, sell what they possessed,
and give up parents, brethren, friends, and
servants.1 In them he sought to kindle the
heroism that will dare all things, and the
enthusiasm that burns for sacrifice. He taught
them that no man might look _b/ack who had
once set his hand to the plough.2 They were
to be the salt of the earth and the light of the
world.3 Courage to confess their faith even
before the great and mighty, fear of God that
knew no fear of man, hardness of heart towards
their dear ones for God's sake, joy of battle
that feared neither the sword nor even dissen-
1 Mark i. 16 ff. ; Luke xiv. 26, 33 ; Mark x. 21, 28 f.
2 Luke ix. 62.
3 Matt. v. 1 3 ff. ; Luke xiv. 34, and passim.

Disciples and Opponents 63
sion among near and dear, — these were the
virtues which he taught them.
But he gave them more than this, more than
the equipment necessary for their future calling.
" He appointed twelve, that they might be with
him" says with direct simplicity the Evangelist
Mark. Gradually the common life of wander
ing led by Jesus and his disciples grew from a
means into an end. The missionary idea and
training became less prominent, the moral com
panionship, with its intrinsic value, more and
more so. Within the circle of his disciples,
and in company with them, he created the first
beginnings of a community-life. Jesus was
with his disciples and they with him. We at
this distance can but dimly augur what wealth,
what freshness and earnestness filled this
common life of Jesus and his disciples, for the
records handed down by our Gospels are
neither detailed nor intimate enough to admit
of a clear vision. But here we may surely be
permitted to exert the imagination. We be
hold Jesus, in the company of his closest

64 Jesus
friends, wandering in lonely places, sometimes
on the mountains, where God seemed more
visibly present to the soul, sometimes resting
in remote hamlets, now in the solitude of the
desert, now in a boat upon the sea. In this
way a life was led free from all restraint of
circumstance or of petty affairs, far from the
noise of the world, on the heights and in the
silence, wholly absorbed in the personal and
the spiritual. The first steps towards a new
life of brotherhood were taken here, in stillness
and privacy ; it was the first wonderful stirring
of a new humanity. We in our time, how
ever, can but stand reverently afar off, before
the veil which hides these beginnings from
our sight.
Around this narrow circle there gathered then
a further band of followers and friends, and of
spectators interested or excited in many
different shades and degrees. Not of all his
disciples did Jesus make such austere and harsh
demands as of those whom he had chosen to be
missionaries. He had friends in the villages

Disciples and Opponents 65
and homesteads, under the conditions of
ordinary life, among houses and families in
many directions. For it was precisely among
the common folk that he loved to find his
followers. They were the "little ones" of
whom he often speaks, the uneducated and
the humble to whom God had revealed
what He had hidden from the "wise."1
Woe unto him who should give cause of
stumbling to one of these simple children,
who were incapable of help or counsel of their
own.2 Above all, however (and we shall have
occasion to speak more fully of this funda
mental characteristic later on), he felt himself
drawn to those whom good society had placed
under the ban ; to those who had refused in
any way to fall in with the forms of the ruling
Pharisaic piety, and were therefore decried as
sinners and worldlings ; to the class of tax-
gatherers, boycotted by Jewish popular fana
ticism as the tools of the foreigner's rule, and
lower still to the wholly outcast and lost, the
1 Matt. xi.?25. 2 Luke xvii. 2 ; Matt, xviii. 1 4.
5

66 Jesus
fallen women and the prostitutes.1 Yet gentle
folk came to him too, for now and then a rich
man of the upper classes would make his
appearance ; respectable women followed in
his train ; 2 occasionally a scribe 3 or a distin
guished and influential councillor 4 would show
themselves among those half won. Scribes
and Pharisees came to dispute with him ;
aristocratic Sadducees came to have a sight of
the holy man of whom such wonders were
told ; even King Herod grew uneasy.6 Thus
all the many-coloured life of the people
thronged round the figure of Jesus.
The picture would not be complete if we
did not briefly touch upon his adversaries.
On the whole, it may be said that all who
possessed influence or consideration with the
people ultimately found themselves on the
side of his avowed opponents. Yet it is
remarkable that the kernel of the opposition
1 John vii. 53-viii. 1 1 ; Luke vii. 36-50, viii. 2.
2 Luke viii. 3. 3 Mark xii. 28.
4 Mark xv. 43. 5 Mark yit j^jg.

Disciples and Opponents 67
was not formed by the priests and religious
functionaries of 1 srael. The priestly aristocracy •
of Jerusalem, which ruled the councils of the
country, did indeed finally bring about his
fall. But Jesus only came into close contact
with it at the end of his life, and we do not
know with any certainty how the sudden
hostility of this class arose. The adversaries
with whom he had to contend in Galilee
were other than these : they were the Scribes
and Pharisees.
The bitterest enemies of Jesus, and the true
antipodes to all that he stood for, were the
Scribes. However closely he resembled them
in the outward forms of his activity, in the
spirit of it he and they were at opposite poles.
On the one hand was the artificiality of a hair
splitting and barren erudition, on the other
the fresh directness of the layman and the son
of the people ; here was the product of long
generations of misrepresentation and distortion,
there was simplicity, plainness, and freedom ;
here a clinging to the petty and the insignifi-

68 Jesus
cant, a burrowing in the dust, there a constant
dwelling upon the essential and a great in
ward sense of reality ; here the refinement of
casuistry, formula- and phrase-mongering, there
the straightforwardness, severity, and pitiless-
ness of the preacher of repentance ; here a
language which was scarcely to be understood,
there the inborn power of the mighty orator ;
here the letter of the law and there the liv
ing God. It was like the meeting of water
and fire. This close corporation of the pro
fessionally learned could never forgive the
simple outsider for making a greater effect
than they, and for the fact that the people
listened to him. Between these two there
must have been mortal enmity from the outset.
And on the other hand, Jesus' love of truth
and feeling for reality, offended by such
caricatures of true piety,1 broke through all the
limits of forbearance, self-restraint, and con-
1 It is to be assumed that from the average here con
sidered an exception must be made in favour of a few
celebrated and really pious rabbis, such as Hillel, Gamaliel,
and some others.

Disciples and Opponents 69
sideration, and allowed the passionate wrath
of his soul to pour forth far and wide. In
contrast to them, his life and personality
gains that touch of relentlessness and pugnacity
which could ill be spared in it.
His attitude towards the Pharisees was the
same as his attitude towards the Scribes. The
Pharisees were no more than the outposts of
the Scribes among the laity— the pietists of
Jewish orthodoxy, the devout after the spirit
and the pattern of rabbinism. But whereas
in Judaea the spirit of rabbinic devoutness
had almost completely triumphed, and Jewish
piety had become practically Pharisaic, in
Galilee the Pharisees seem only to have formed
small centres at the time of Jesus' appearance.
Even later, Galilee was regarded by the Scribes
as an unfruitful land almost lost to the cause
of piety, and its people as vulgar, stupid, and
unhearing. Still, Pharisaic circles were to be
found there, and naturally considered them
selves to have a monopoly of righteousness.
Here in Galilee Jesus could enter the lists

70 Jesus
amid the delight of the simple-hearted be
lievers and the rejoicing and applause of the
multitude. He did not fail to do so. " Except
your righteousness exceed the righteousness of
the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in nowise
enter into the kingdom of heaven." 1
But this antagonism of Jesus to the Scribes
and Pharisees has taken us from the outward
forms of his activity to its material content,
and it is impossible to realise him without to
some extent examining the latter.
1 Matt. v. 20.

BOOK II
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
CHAPTER V
The Kingdom of God
Jesus took up his ministry with the cry that
the Kingdom of God was at hand,1 and the
idea that the Kingdom was approaching is
throughout the dominant note of his teach
ing. The Kingdom of God — there was no
need for Jesus to enter into detailed explana
tions of what he meant by the phrase, for
every child in the country could have told
him. At the moment that Jesus took up
his preaching, the people in whose midst
he appeared lay trampled into complete
subjection. Harsh masters ruled the land ; in
Judssa the accursed Romans, in Galilee a
1 Matt. iv. 17.
7i

72 Jesus
prince set up by them, who came of the detested
house of Herod ; harsh tax-collectors, creatures
of the despotic overlords, plundered the people,
and the people themselves, simple, hard-working
and deprived of all the pleasures of life, felt
themselves lost in a world that had become
vast, hostile, and cold. Their spiritual leaders
told them that they were not pious enough, and
set them in the thorny path of the law, only
to blame them if they followed it unwillingly
and found themselves wholly unable to obey
the multifarious rules of the " true " piety
which the Scribes had devised in their learned
ease. But deep in their hearts lay the hope
of the Kingdom of God, of those great and
marvellous things which Israel should still live
to see, according to its ancient prophecies ; of
the grand procession of events, the reversal of
all existing circumstance, the dawn of the
new golden day, which was to leap up at last
with its broad beams of light and scatter the
shadows of poverty and want, hunger and
thirst, and God-forsaken longing.

The Kingdom of God 73
Then came Jesus, preaching " Rejoice and
be glad: blessed are ye, for the kingdom of
God is at hand ! " How different was his
message from that of the Baptist ! John had
appeared in the south, where he saw around
him only the insolence of a barren piety of
erudition, the pride of a degenerate priestly
caste, and the licentious frivolity of a city
population. Hence his preaching of the
Kingdom had become fierce and hard, and
entirely concentrated upon the ideas of judg
ment, terror, and destruction. We shall see
below that even with Jesus the words, "The
kingdom of God is at hand," had their reverse
sense of " The Judgment cometh " ; but at. first
he preferred to strike the other fundamental
note of the message of the Kingdom. The
tidings he brought were tidings of promise ; he
saw that the first necessity was to let a bright
ray of hope and joy into the dull and weary
souls of this anxious people, and so he cried,
" Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom
of heaven." When in after years the disciples

74 Jesus
of Jesus tried to express his work and his
whole being in a single word, they called
the story of his life the evayyeXiov, or good
tidings. The substance of these tidings was : " The
kingdom (or reign) x of God is at hand." Jesus
did not say to the people, " The moment is
come : now see ye that the Kingdom of God
appear : compel its coming," for that was the
misleading cry of the fanatical patriots who
had already begun to show themselves,
especially in Galilee. Rather his immovable
belief was that the ordinary doings and earthly
labour of men could not bring the Kingdom
of God one finger 's-breadth nearer to mankind.
[ In his view the coming of the Kingdom lay
wholly in the sphere of the future and the
supernatural. The living, all-powerful God,
and He alone, would set up His marvellous
reign. But He would indeed set it up, and
1 The Greek word Basileia signifies both "kingdom"
and "reign," and bears now the one and now the other of
these two closely connected meanings.

The Kingdom of God 75
that soon. Therefore lift up your heads and
await the miraculous to-come.
How strange and naive do these ideas of
Jesus seem to us at the first glance! How
closely does his preaching appear to be inter
woven in this respect with the thoughts and
hopes of contemporary Judaism ! How easy
do we find it to calculate that he, together
with his countrymen and his disciples, was
mistaken in his expectation of the immediate
nearness of this mighty supernatural change ! 1
Hence it is that many attempts have been
made to give the preaching of Jesus a more
modern dress, and to read into his words all
manner of " deeper " and " more original "
ideas. It has above all been insisted that in
the words of Jesus the Kingdom of God
1 It is impossible to deny this expectation of an im
mediate end on the part of Jesus. It is proved not only
by certain clear and distinct sayings (such as Mark ix. 1,
xiii. 30, Matt. x. 23), but principally by the whole tone of
his preaching of the future, in which he concentrates the
attention of his disciples upon the end as though it were
an immediately impending event.

76 Jesus
frequently appears to mean an already present
and inward power. It is indeed admitted that,
strictly speaking, the idea of the Kingdom in
Jesus' preaching is an eschatological one, i.e.
that the Kingdom of God is represented
entirely as a future and yet-to-be-hoped-for
state, and above all as a supernatural event
which would be brought about by the miracu
lous power of God, in close connection with
a marvellous outward metamorphosis of all
existing circumstance. Side by side with this,
however, it is contended that in his preaching
of the Kingdom Jesus expresses the idea that
this same Kingdom of God was already
present, growing and ripening inwardly and
by inward transformation of existing circum
stance ; that it was to be built up by the
moral actions of mankind, beginning with
those of Jesus and his disciples, and even that
it represented the community of those who
were morally and spiritually bound together
vby such actions. These modern ideas, how
ever, must be entirely rejected in so far as

The Kingdom of God 77
they concern Jesus' conception of the Kingdom
of God. Such an interpretation introduces
without cogent reason a scarcely conceivable
confusion and inconsistency into the clear and
simple mental world of Jesus.
Certain sayings of Jesus are indeed cited in
support of this view. Thus the incident is
adduced in which he cries out against the
sneers of the Pharisees : " If I by the Spirit
of God cast out devils, then is the kmgdom of
God come upon you."1 Here it is certainly
true that in his eyes the Kingdom of God
was already present. But it must not be for
gotten that this is a saying spoken at a
moment of greatexjcitement, in which he
likens his own miracles and casting out of
devils directly to the miraculous power of
God, with which He would presently set up
His Kingdom and trample Satan, the prince
of all the devils, underfoot. The Kingdom of
God — and here lies the essential point —
remains within the sphere of the marvellous
1 Matt. xii. 28.

78 Jesus
and the supernatural. The idea of an inward
development by preaching and social labour
is not even remotely present. The same
thought is expressed in Jesus' answer to the
Pharisees, when they had boasted that they
could calculate the hour of the coming of the
Kingdom by methods of human ingenuity:
" The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation : neither shall they say, Lo here !
or there ! for lo, the kingdom of God is in the
midst of you." x It had escaped the inquiring
Pharisees that the beginnings of the Kingdom
were already manifesting themselves in their
presence. Here again we have an inspired
and paradoxical saying of Jesus in which he
was certainly thinking of his own actions, but
in their miraculous, not in their moral aspect ;
as on another occasion, when the envoys of the
Baptist asked him whether he were " He that
cometh," i.e. whether the Kingdom were to be
1 Luke xvii. 20. Perhaps too the right translation is,
" For lo, the Kingdom of God will (suddenly) be among
you." In that case the whole passage would refer to the
future Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God 79
expected with him, he pointed for answer
to the wonders he had wrought.1
But the principal support for the view here
disputed is sought in the so-called Parables of
the Kingdom ; though scarcely with justice.
When Jesus in the parable of the grain of
mustard-seed2 speaks of the rapid and enor
mous growth of the Kingdom of Heaven, we
must remember that the mustard-shrub was a
garden plant which sprang up in a single
summer. Thus there is no question in this
parable of the development of centuries, in
which the Kingdom of God should gradually
rise victorious over the nations, but of an in
conceivably swift and dazzling coming of the
golden age, now appearing in its first tentative
beginnings through the activity of Jesus in
miracle-working and casting out of demons.
Here too, therefore, we have the marvel
lously rapid approach of the Kingdom in the
miraculous, and are very far removed from
1 Matt. xi. 2 ff.
2 Mark iv. 30 ff. ; Luke xiii. 18-21 ; Matt. xiii. 31 f.

80 Jesus
the modern idea of slow development. Again,
in the other well-known parable where the
Kingdom of God is compared to a pearl for
which the merchant who finds it gives all that
he has to buy it,1 this does not mean that the
Kingdom of God Was a present possession, but
precisely the contrary. The parable is meant
to show the necessity of hazarding all present
goods for the sake of a future and yet-to-be-
acquired good. Even in the parable of the
peasant who casts seed upon the earth, and
can then do nothing but await the harvest,
the emphasis lies not upon the description of
the gradual growth of the seed, but on the
idea that the corn ripens to the harvest
" of itself." The Kingdom of God will not
come by man's assistance, but of itself, or
rather from above, from the God who gives
the harvest. Man is to do his duty, but
when that is done he must wait until God
utters His Jiat.
Thus the fact remains that the Kingdom of
1 Matt. xiii. 45.

The Kingdom of God 81
God as Jesus preached it lay principally in the
domain of the future, and wholly in the
domain of the miraculous.1 It was God's
Kingdom pure and simple, to^be established
by the omnipotent God at the moment when
He upheaved the heavens and the earth, raised
the dead, and vanquished and destroyed the
devil and all his angels. It was for this king
dom that Jesus taught his disciples to pray so
fervently " Thy kingdom come." And if now
and again he seemed to see some portion of it
already present in his own works, this was only
during the rush of enthusiasm that seized him
when he had reached some pinnacle of success.
The course of his own life and work was to
1 The best known of the so-called Parables of the King
dom, that of the sower, is not, strictly speaking, a Parable
of the Kingdom at all. Jesus is there dealing with the
effect or non-effect of his own preaching. In the saying
of Matt. xi. 11, that he that is but little in the Kingdom
of Heaven is greater than John the Baptist, the word
Kingdom of Heaven is certainly almost equivalent to
"society of the disciples of Jesus." But this saying,
which alone does not fit in with the general sense of Jesus'
preaching of the Kingdom, probably belongs to the
language of the later community. 6

82 Jesus
show him that the road to the Kingdom of
God was not so straight after all, but reached
its end at last through suffering and death.
\$| Nor is the very widespread idea that the
eschatological hopes of his countrymen were
altogether spiritualised by Jesus to be ac
cepted as it stands. When he told the
Sadducees that in that blessed future life
there would be neither marrying nor giving
in marriage,1 he was certainly spiritualising
the vulgar notion, but in all probability he
was not expressing anything entirely new, for
this must have been the conviction of a great
many truly religious men at the time he
uttered it. On the other hand, when Jesus
spoke of the future, he was not thinking of a
colourless and purely heavenly beyond, but
pictured it to himself as a state of things
existing upon this earth — though of course a
transfigured earth — and in his own land. ' In
the Gospel of Matthew we certainly find the
expression "Kingdom of Heaven" again and
1 Mark xii. 25.

The Kingdom of God 83
again upon his lips, but we must not be misled
by it. For we know that even if Jesus did
make use of the term " Kingdom of Heaven,"
he meant neither more nor less by it than if
he had said " Kingdom of God." He would,
in fact, merely have been following the usage
of his time and surroundings, by which it was
customary to avoid mentioning the name of
God, and instead of "the fear of God" or
"the hand of God," to say "the fear of
Heaven" and "the hand of Heaven." From
the expression " Kingdom of Heaven," there
fore, it is impossible to draw any inference as
to the place and nature of the kingdom pro
claimed by Jesus. Nor was Jesus at all afraid
of painting the joys of the glorious future to
his disciples in rich and sensuous colours. He
speaks of the filling of the hungry,1 of eating
and drinking and sitting at table with the
patriarchs in the Kingdom of Heaven ; 2 he is
fond of describing the delights of the future
under the simile of a feast or a wedding, and
1 Luke vi. 21. 2 Matt. viii. 11.

84 Jesus
he prophesies a time when he and his would
drink of the fruit of the vine in the Kingdom
of Heaven.1 It shows a want of understanding
of the popular simplicity of Jesus' preaching
to see in all this merely parable and symbolic
expression. However hard it may seem, it is
our duty to accustom ourselves to the idea
that in his preaching Jesus was very largely
a child of his age and a faithful son of his
country. Nevertheless we have so far considered but
one aspect of the preaching of Jesus concerning
the Kingdom of God. If nothing more were
to be said about it, it would merely have
been an unheard-of accident that the labour
and preaching of Jesus should still have con
tained the germs of a world-religion and of
a universal transformation and renewal such
as we mortals have never beheld elsewhere.
Though steeped in the eschatological hopes of
his time and country, he yet succeeded in
altering and purifying them at the critical
1 Luke xxii. 18 (and cf. xxii. 16).

The Kingdom of God 85
point, and in breaking through the limits
which hemmed them in. For at the time '
of Jesus the eschatological hopes of the Jews,
} wherever they were truly alive, were tied and
! bound to their spirit of nationalism, They
were the hopes of the people of Israel. Their
central idea was that Israel should one day
come to its own and wield the sovereignty
which belonged to it of right. The Kingdom )
of God was neither more nor less than the/
rule of Israel. That the hated tribe of Rome\ >
should one day lie grovelling in the dust with \
Israel's foot upon its neck, that the Messiah, \
God's chosen King, should rule the world
from Jerusalem with might and glory, that
the nations should come and pay tribute
before Israel, and that Jerusalem and its
temple should be built up again in splendour,
while the saints bore rule throughout the
land of Palestine — such were the hopes which
occupied the first place in the pious Israelite's
outlook, whenever he gazed into the future.
Even if they were sometimes mingled with

8 6 Jesus
more profound ideas of the nearness of God
or the forgiveness of sins, of purity of heart
or the outpouring of the Spirit, th_ese_were and
remained the cardinal points. If in the poems
of some of the Jewish seers idealism did spread
its wings more freely, its flight was clogged by
the leaden weight of the national hopes, now
grown into fanaticism, which impeded all free
movement. In short, the eschatological hopes
of the Jews remained fettered to the nation,
and therefore to the earth.
But in the soul of Jesus a wonderful
deliverance was wrought. It worked its
way wholly from within outwards. Naturally,
indeed, when he spoke of the Kingdom of
[God, he thought first and foremost of a
kingdom in Israel, and he would also have
taken it for granted that the empire of Rome
could not subsist side by side with the empire
of God. His gaze was directed upon Israel ;
he bound himself to its people by his works,
and felt himself sent to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel ; he even described the future

The Kingdom of God 87
as a sitting at meat in company with the
patriarchs of the old covenant. All this is
true ; yet on the other hand it formed but '
the mould into which his genius poured a new
content. Here at last we grasp the secret of
that marvellous power by which dross was
transformed into the clearest, finest gold. His
inmost religious character stands revealed : the
sense that God was infinitely greater and in
finitely more than all the world besides — a
reality beside which all other realities paled
and sank. (Only for this reality had Jesus!
thought and feeling, and hence he proclaimed j
the Kingdom of God.) That Israel should,
( rule and the Romans be laid low was nothing
to him, or at most it was but the outward
form in which God's purpose would be ful
filled ; the earthly side of the promise of the
Kingdom did not interest him ; it left him
cold. What did fill his soul to the brim was
the thought that God would come, that God
would bear rule, that righteousness would
conquer and good triumph. Whereas in

88 Jesus
Jewish literature the expression " Kingdom
of God " is but seldom met with, Jesus made
it the very foundation of his preaching. The
Jewish patriots looked for much else besides
the Kingdom and the rule of God — above all
for their own kingdom, the " kingdom of the
saints " ; Jesus spoke only of the Kingdom of
God. And thus, without saying it directly,
he purified the hopes of the Jewish people in
marvellous wise and freed them from their
limitations. When he speaks of the blessed
and glorious future, all notes of confused
passion and worldly hatred die away ; he
calls it the time when the pure in heart
shall see God, when the peacemakers shall
be called the sons of God, when the merciful
shall obtain mercy, when the good and faithful
servants of God shall win their reward, when
the multiplied talents shall be shown and the
new tasks assigned, when evil will disappear
and good rise triumphant. It is astonishing
to see how utterly he rejects all the national
and political hopes of the Jews, that vital

The Kingdom of God 89
element of their eschatological faith. If
occasionally some note of it is to be met
with, if Jesus actually spoke of a time in
which his disciples should sit upon twelve
thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel,1
these are but the last faint echoes of an old
melody, sounding on into the new song.
It is this, too, that explains the certainty and
confidence with which Jesus proclaimed the
Kingdom of God, and continued to do so in
spite of all the disappointments of his career./
At first, and even far on into his ministry,
he combined the idea of the Kingdom of
God with that of his own people of Israeli
To the very end he spent his labours upon
them alone. And yet, unless all our tradition
is at fault — and we are obliged to trust to it
if we do not wish to assert that Jesus had a
less keen perception of the nature of things
than the prophets of old — Jesus must have
recognised more and more clearly as his
ministry went on that his own people,
1 Matt. xix. 28.

90 Jesus
amongst whom he worked, did not answer
to his expectations.1 As his predecessor
John the Baptist had seen the judgment
hanging over this people, so Jesus saw, to his
horror, the children of the Kingdom cast forth
into the outer darkness.2 Israel was to him
as the unfruitful fig-tree, which deserved to
wither because it produced leaves without
blossoms.3 In the fate of those who were
killed by the falling of the tower of Siloam,
or of the Galileans whom Pilate had
murdered in the Temple, he saw, as in a
mirror, the fate of the whole nation.4 He
prophesied that, as in the days of Noah and
Lot, so should the judgment fall upon this
frivolous multitude ; 6 he saw his country
men hastening along the broad road to destruc
tion,6 and we must surely assume, with the
1 For what follows cf. p. 56, above.
2 Matt. viii. 12.
3 Mark xi. 12-14 (20). The Gospel tradition has here
turned a parable or a symbolic action (the cursing of the
fig-tree) into an extravagant miracle.
4 Luke xiii. 1 ff., 4 ff.
6 Luke xvii. 26 ff. « Luke xiii. 24 ff.

The Kingdom of God 91
tradition, that he foretold how the Temple,
the very centre of contemporary Judaism,
should have not one stone left upon another.1
^Yet in spite of all this, the confidence and\
joyousness of his preaching of the Kingdom
remained unshaken. To him God was
greater than the world and of more account
than his own countrymen, and the rule of
God was something other than and inde
pendent of the rule of Israel. He had already
promised his disciples, in a time of anxiety
and distress, that they should proclaim upon
the house-tops what he had told them in their
ear.2 It is true that in his short life he
never accomplished the outward breach with
Israel. He began by bidding his disciples go
into no street of the Gentiles and into no city
of the Samaritans,3 and told them that they
would not have carried the Gospel to all the
cities of Israel " till the Son of Man be come." *
He refused to help the foreign woman because
1 Mark xiii. 1 f. 2 Matt. x. 26 f.
3 Matt. x. 5. 4 Matt. x. 23.

92 Jesus
he was " not sent except unto the lost sheep
of the house of Israel." And yet in an
intuitive, prophetic way he was able to con
ceive and to face the idea of the separateness
of the Kingdom of God from the people of
Israel. Here the Old Testament came to his
aid. It told him of the men of Nineveh who
accepted Jonah's preaching of repentance, of
the queen of the south who came to hear
Solomon,1 of Elijah and the widow of Zare-
phath, of Elisha and Naaman the Syrian ; 2
and many another prophetic utterance about
the blindness of the chosen people and the
coming of the nations to God must have sunk
into his heart. Experiences of his own were
not lacking, such as the incidents of the cen
turion at Capernaum and of the Canaanitish
woman who importuned him to help her.
Then there flashed into his soul the thought
that the sons of the Kingdom should be cast
forth into the outer darkness, while many
should come from the east and the west and
1 Matt. xii. 40 ff. 2 Luke iv. 24 ff.

The Kingdom of God 93
sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
in the Kingdom of Heaven.1 And further,
when he declared that the vineyard should be
taken away from the present husbandmen and
given to others, or that the guests who were
bidden to the marriage feast should not taste
of it, but should give place to others gathered
together from the highways and hedges, he
was contemplating here too, in a suggestive
and prophetic way, the same tremendous
transformation. 2
Even if one were inclined to refer these and
other indications to a later Christian tradition,
two things remain untouched. The first is
that the triumphant conviction that the King-
1 Matt. viii. 11.
2 Luke xiv. 16 ff. ; Matt. xxii. 2-10; Mark xii. 1 ff. In
these two parables it is of course open to question whether
Jesus meant to contrast the leaders of the people with the
simple lower classes, or the nation itself with the Gentiles.
When Luke mentions a twofold invitation after the refusal
of the originally invited guests, he was probably thinking
first of the poorer classes of the people, and after them of
the Gentiles ; so that he must have understood the original
parable, which contained but one invitation (cf. Matt.), in
the former sense.

94 Jesus
|dom of God must come, which afterwards filled
the disciples of Jesus from the very beginning,
the conviction that whatever attitude men
might take up towards it, the rule of God
must find its way into their hearts ; the joyous,
fearless, and undaunted mission-work of the
little flock, upon which Paul was able to pro
ceed in spite of the nationalist limitations it
- had at first suffered under : these things are
j spirit of Jesus' spirit, and flame of the fire of
S his soul.
Still more important, however, is the con
sideration that even if Jesus did not himself
draw the external consequences of his own
preaching of the Kingdom, if all these bold
words were merely the later voice of his
community, we should still have in them the
logical consummation of Jesus' preaching of
the Kingdom of God. For in that preaching
the decisive severance from the national
element had already occurred ; with the idea
of the Kingdom of God the universalism of
\the Gospel is already present in embryo. By

The Kingdom of God 95
lifting the idea of the Kingdom into the re
hgious sphere — a sphere in which earthly hopes
and national passions must necessarily sink,
with everything unclean, before the majesty
of the omnipresent God — Jesus freed religion
at the critical point from the nation, so far at
least as the nation constituted a danger and a
limitation to religion. All that followed upon
this was merely the external working out.
Even when the bonds of nationality were
finally and visibly broken, when Paul carried
the torch of the Gospel over to the Gentiles,
Jesus' preaching of the Kingdom of God did
not lose its freshness. Better even than the
inmost core of Paul's preaching, Jesus' an
nouncement of the approaching rule of God
was grasped and understood. It won its way
in its original purity, freedom, and earnestness ;
what was temporal in it was freely cast aside,
while the eternal elements were easily ab
sorbed : " The kingdom of God cometh, God
himself cometh. Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God."

96 Jesus
But the objection may be raised that, even
if Jesus' preaching of the Kingdom was of
decisive importance for the first centuries of
Christian development, for us it has no longer
any significance. And it is certainly true that
in its naive form it seems very far removed
from all modern experience, History, the
irrevocable march of events, have proved that
the expectation of an immediate and mighty
transformation was mistaken. So much is
beyond dispute. For us the idea of the possi
bility of any universal change has retreated at
least to the extreme limit of our thought ;
and indeed, in the shape in which Jesus an
nounced it, it has become absolutely incon
ceivable. Through the influence which the
Copernican system has exercised upon our
minds, our idea of the physical world has
become other than that upon which the
eschatological hopes of Jesus rested, in their
form at any rate.
Nevertheless even here it will be advisable
not to throw away hastily and rashly things

The Kingdom of God 97
of permanent value and importance in the
preaching of Jesus. The form of his preach
ing of the Kingdom was transitory, and its
husk has already shed itself. But within the
form there lies an eternal content. The
Gospels lay it down with energy and decision
that this world, with its events and its labours,
is not an endless affair, continually repeating'
itself and revolving in a circle, but that every
thing has its ending, its aim and goal, which
rest in the hand of God and he determined
beforehand in His mind. And all that appears;
to us strange, fantastic, and childish in Jesus'
preaching of the Kingdom we must regard as
the necessary body without which the spirit
hidden within it could not come to life — as
the transient and glittering raiment cast over
eternal ideas. Those to whom this notion of
a final and conclusive world's end seems too
remote, should consider that our own little
life, ringed round by birth and death, suddenly
appearing out of the darkness of night, out of
an unknown Whence, will die away again all

98 Jesus
too soon and pass out into an unknown
Whither, of which we, as disciples of Jesus,
can only dimly believe and hope that it will
be an existence nearer to God. If Jesus ex
pected the irruption and appearance of this
unknown world in the immediate future, we
can no longer share his expectation ; yet our
own end, our own entry into the darkness of
the Beyond, still remains a thing of the
immediate future. And with this in mind
we can still pray in the spirit of Jesus, though
not in the direct and literal sense of his
words, "Thy kingdom come." And for us
too, his saying shines with everlasting light,
" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see God."

CHAPTER VI
Jesus' Conception of God
How near and tangible the Gospel of Jesus
is to us in its main ideas and fundamental
features will best be seen when we penetrate
still deeper, past the outward form, with its
temporal limitations, to the spirit beyond.
Here then, as in all other religions, we find it
to be the simple faith in God. The form of
Jesus' preaching, conditioned as it was by his
time and surroundings, was, " The kingdom
of God is at hand: God cometh." But we
shall reach its spirit when we ask : " Who)
was the God of Jesus, whose coming he an-V
nounced? What did the word God mean toJ
him ? "
One thing becomes clear at once, in looking i
99

ioo Jesus
at the general picture of Jesus' life and person
ality : that for him God was a reahty, clear,
' living, and present above all others. For the
devout Jewish patriots of his time and
'surroundings God was certainly a reality too,
but another equally strong and closely con
nected reahty was the people of Israel, with
its claim on happiness and universal dominion.
[ For them the rule of God meant the rule of
Israel. And since Israel now lay trampled
underfoot, they could never enjoy or feel sure
of the corresponding reality of God. Their
faith and confidence became mingled with tor
turing doubts ; the religious community grew
uneasy, exasperated, and subject to all sorts
of fluctuating moods, which were ever ready
to pass into their opposites. High-spirited
confidence alternated in rapid succession
with gnawing uncertainty ; boastful exaltation
of one's own merit with abject humility,
pride with grovelling penitence. But, above
all, faith in a living and ever-present God who
interfered with a strong hand in the history

Jesus' Conception of God 101
of the present, was entirely lost sight of.
They could neither conceive nor feel such a
presence, for their eyes were fixed upon this
broken and low-fallen people. Hence they
directed all the fervour of their faith towards
the future ; they believed in a God who,tf
. though far distant now, would in the future
draw near again. Their faith became in fact ¦'
a mere matter of hope. On the other hand,
those who held themselves more aloof from
the popular piety and the exaggerated national
hopes, the specifically pious, the learned class
who were wholly absorbed in the law and
the Scriptures, were apt to let reality and
the feeling for it vanish from their grasp.
They created a fictitious reality for themselves
in their rabbinic schools, in the silence of
their own chambers, beside their rolls of the
law ; and in the place of the living presence
of God — though indeed this was not wholly
lost to view — they set the spider's webs of
their own learning, in which they claimed to
have caught the absolute will of God. What

102 Jesus
they cared for was the ingenuity and erudition
necessary for the interpretation of Scripture ;
they delighted in disputation for its own sake
and in distorted subtleties, and enjoyed the
esteem and veneration of numerous pupils
whose ambition was to become even as their
masters were before them.
~ But to Jesus God was once more a reality.
That, as we have seen, was the secret of his
preaching of the Kingdom. And because
j God was to him a fact which far surpassed
all others in importance, even his belief in
his own people, he was in a position to lift
the idea of the Kingdom of God into a higher
sphere.
/ Moreover, God was to him a present reality,
not merely a matter of hope and of the future.
At first sight it might seem, after what has
been said above, that this was not the case,
for Jesus proclaims first and foremost the
approaching God and the approaching King
dom. Yet future and present are in reality
marvellously blended into one. For while

Jesus' Conception of God 103
in the main the Jewish patriots expected from
the future and the action of God something
of which they were, now experiencing the
direct contrary — namely, the revival and uni
versal supremacy of their own people — Jesus
in the main expected from the future nothing
essentially different from what he was already
experiencing in his own breast — namely, the
sense of nearness to God, the vision of God,
the satisfying of the great longing and hunger
after God, the triumphant victory of good
over evil. The coming God was already there
before his soul in tangible presence, and the
future was to. him so sure and certain because
his God was a present reality.
And a most living reality too. Never was
God felt as such a hving presence in the life
of any man. Jesus breathed in an atmosphere
of God ; everything in his life, so far as we
know it, was religion. With every word he
directed his own and his hearers' souls to
wards God ; in every situation of his life,
even the most difficult, he took refuge with

1 04 Jesus
God and listened to His voice ; all joy became
a thanksgiving, and all pain a submission to
God's will. Everything in him is aimed at
the highest and ultimate goal; nowhere is
there any slackening or trifling or pursuit of
side-issues. Piety informs his life like a
never-failing electric current, flowing with
quiet and even force through his soul, free
from all hindrance and distraction. At certain
points indeed a stronger tension may be
observed, and the sparks leap up with destroy
ing energy, especially when he meets with
opposition. Well may we guess, too, that in
the depths of that soul many a battle had
been fought through of which the children of
ordinary life have no conception ; but in all
that he shows of his inner life the strongest
impressions are those of harmonious calm and
firm, concentrated power. He himself was
conscious of the greatest antithesis to his own
being when he came across some purely
worldly life, given up to the present with its
unrest, its cares, divisions, and confusions. He

Jesus' Conception of God 105
scourged it in many a vigorous parable : 1
"Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul
required of thee ; and the things which thou
hast prepared, whose shall they be ? " To his
disciples he taught above all things the great
sursum corda, the wealth of the heart in
God ; he sought to lift them into his own
sphere, to which the cares and calculations of
the world, and the noise and trouble of every
day, were unable to penetrate.2
Further, we must observe that for Jesus
God was a purely spiritual, personal reality.
" God is a spirit, and they that worship Him
must worship in spirit and truth,"3 — so did
one of his greatest disciples sum up Jesus'
message and desires on this point. His whole
intercourse with God lies in the realm of the
spiritual and personal. Nowhere is any value
attached to outward means and forms. The
entire sacred cult of his country contributed
nothing to the true core of his piety. If
1 Luke xii. 15 ff. ; xvi. 9 ff 2 Matt. vi. 19 ff
3 John iv. 24.

106 Jesus
he did once exert himself in grim earnest for
the holiness and purity of the Temple service,
perhaps this was only because of his general
dislike of all pseudo-holiness and hypocrisy.^
Nor should we forget that Jesus' whole life
and work, apart from their ending, were
enacted on a stage far removed from the
Temple and its cult. Jesus could say, in the
manner of the old prophets, " I desire mercy,
and not sacrifice " ; 1 he set reconciliation with
one's brother2 and fulfilment of one's filial
duty 3 unhesitatingly before the service of the
altar. He could endure the thought that not
one stone of the Temple should be left upon
another,4 and the bold words " Destroy this
temple that is made with hands, and in three
days I will build another made without
hands," played an important part in the
charges brought against him.5 It is true that
with this inward detachment of religion from
the official cult, Jesus was only completing a
1 Matt. ix. 13. 2 Matt. v. 23 f. 3 Mark vii. 10 ff.
4 Mark xiii. If. 5 Mark xiv. 58.

Jesus' Conception of God 107
movement which had already been stirring
for a considerable time within the Jewish
body. The Temple cult had long ceased to
play the part which had belonged to it in
the first centuries of the renovated Temple.
Though outwardly still an object of splendour,
it had lost its inward significance for and
power over the souls of the pious nation.
The law had stepped in beside the cult,
rabbinism beside the degenerate and worldly
priesthood, the synagogue beside the Temple,
prayer and alms-giving beside sacrifice. But
Jesus not only completed what was already
begun, he also delivered the true, spiritual
piety from the dangerous enemies which had
sprung up in the place of the old cult — from
the corruption of religion by legalism and
casuistry, from the glorification of the letter
and the blind clinging to use and wont.
He effected this deliverance by inward
means, not by any outward agitation and
violence. Circumcision, tithes, the keeping
of the Sabbath, prayer and alms-giving — all

108 Jesus
these he left standing as they were, so long as
they were not actively harmful. But he left
them in the position which belonged to them,
namely, on the outskirts and in the forecourt
of the religious life. He taught that they
were matters of indifference, and that they
might be done while the " weightier matters "
were not left undone.1 Only where the ex
ternal enveloped and choked the spiritual,
did he ruthlessly destroy it. The path along
which he took his followers led upwards to
the pure heights of the spirit. He set them
face to face, not with use and wont, the claims
and the letter of the law, and its painful and
exact fulfilment, but with the living God.
And while with sure though gentle hand he
released religion from its ancient forms, he
nevertheless created no new forms, nothing
material to place between God and His dis
ciples. Yet how soon was this altered by the
community he left behind him ! How soon
did they return to the view that, even though
1 Matt, xxiii. 23.

Jesus' Conception of God 109
faith and the personal relation of the believer
to God was the main point, yet material,
mystical transactions and external ceremonies
could not be dispensed with ! Baptism became^
to the Christians an actual immersion with an
external, miraculous, cleansing, and hallowing >
effect, brought about by the agency of conse
crated water ; and the solemn bestowal of the
name at baptism was intended as a protection
against the evil spirits working in the world.
The Last Supper became a sacred and miracu- »
lous food by which the believer obtained
communion with God and eternal life: in
fact, an ever-recurring sacrificial rite. Of
all this nothing is to be found in the Gospels
themselves. The earthly Jesus did not establish •
the baptismal rite at all ; it was an institution
of his community. The Last Supper certainly ...
has its foundation in that most impressive
action of Jesus on the evening before his
death. But it is not even certain whether by
that action Jesus meant to charge his disciples
with a rite to be repeated ; and the assumption

no J

esus

that he instituted thereby a sacrament, a
ceremony which, by its outward performance,
secured to mankind a supernatural, spiritual
good independent of the personal and rehgious
attitude of the believer, contradicts all that we
otherwise know of the conduct and character
of Jesus. The Gospel of Jesus stands out here
in unsurpassed purity, bearing within itself a
power which must again and again bring
deliverance in spite of all distortion and
materialisation. Jesus gave his disciples the
spiritual, personal God ; to him the personal
was everything, the material nothing.
Now this real, living, present and spiritual
God was emphatically the Almighty in Jesus'
sight. This must not be forgotten, even
though we are accustomed to consider other
sides of his preaching first. Jesus conceived
of God in the whole overwhelming majesty of
His being. Even in the fourth Gospel we
have " The Father is greater than I."1 With
the fullest and truest human modesty, Jesus
1 John xiv. 28,

Jesus' Conception of God in
humbled himself before the all-powerful,
marvellous, and mysterious God. He strikes
a note from the very depths of his soul when
he tells his disciples, " Be not afraid of them
which kill the body, and after that have no
more that they can do. But I will warn you
whom ye shall fear : Fear him which, after
he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell ;
yea, I say unto you, Fear him."1 His own
life was swayed by this God whose ways were
at times so dark and Himself so hard to
recognise. Disappointment after disappoint
ment, suffering upon suffering, did He cast
in its path. Nothing was spared to Jesus.
After a short and hopeful beginning, there
came a standstill and then a rapid retrogres
sion, accompanied by the scorn, contempt, and
hostility of all who were of any account in
the world, and by the faithlessness of the
multitude ; then came the clear conviction of
the fruitlessness of his work, a foreboding
which gradually grew to certainty of his own
1 Luke xii. 4 f.

112 J

esus
dark fate, the dumb impotence of the few
who remained true to him, betrayal from the
inmost circle of his friends, infinite loneliness
and forsakenness, and finally, a death by
torture. He learnt that God was terrible, and
that an awful darkness and dread encircled
Him even for those who stood nearest to
Him. How then could this aspect of God
have been suppressed in his preaching?
Yet this was, after all, but one side of his
faith in God, — one might almost say its hidden
substructure. If Jesus had not grasped and
proclaimed anything beyond this, he would
have been on a level with the great prophets
of the Old Testament, or with John the
Baptist, but no greater. But the greatest thing
about him was that, in spite of his ever-present
consciousness of the all-absorbing majesty of
God, he yet seized and retained far more
surely than any that had gone before him the
idea of the inclination of God's nature towards
the finite nature of man. Like the rising sun,
the faith in God the Father arose and illumin-

Jesus' Conception of God 113
ated his preaching. Not that Jesus proclaimed
anything absolutely new with such a faith.
To the piety of ancient Israel, with its national
bias, the belief that God was the Father of
Israel and Israel His son had not been
unknown. And in the more individualistic
piety of later Judaism, the belief occasionally
comes to hght — and more and more frequently
the nearer we approach to Jesus' own time —
that God was the Father of each individual
believer. These beginnings ought not to be
ignored; they represent a religious advance
made by later Judaism in this respect, and
Jesus was here also the consummator of what
already existed. In the piety of the later
Hellenic culture, about the time of Jesus and
of the infant Church, kindred notes were also
struck. Nevertheless the fact remains that
the faith in God the Father was nowhere
conceived with such unerring certainty, such
self-evident simphcity, as in the preaching of
Jesus. Jesus created the holiest and most
lasting symbol that has ever appeared in the

114 Jesus
history of religion, the Lord's Prayer, in which
all who are truly his disciples will ever meet
on common ground. The march of centuries
has not been able to rob those parables in
which he celebrates the fatherly love of God,
of their pristine freshness and truth, for they
are fashioned of the finest gold. The glory of
the lihes of the field, the joyous song of the
birds of the air, the whole world in its beauty
bore witness to the fatherly goodness of God.
Through his faith in a heavenly Father, a
great calm peace broods over the hfe of Jesus.
It is as if, after long erring and straying, our
wandering humanity had found its way safely
back in Jesus to the living God, and were now
taking its rest in silent, long-pent joy.
Jesus' faith in the Fatherhood of God was no
shallow optimism. Rather it was an infinitely
bold venture. It was his own characteristic
achievement that at every moment of his life
he could address as Father the terrible God
who filled his soul with a sense of his un
speakable majesty, and who surrounded his

Jesus' Conception of God 115
whole being with impenetrable darkness and
mystery. It was to Him that he turned when
the bitter disappointments of his life came
upon him : " I thank thee, Father, Lord of
heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these
things from the wise and understanding, and
didst reveal them unto babes : yea, Father,
for so it was well-pleasing in thy sight."1 To
His will he resigned himself after the bitter
struggle in Gethsemane, when disaster stared
him in the face : " Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass away from me : nevertheless, not
as I will, but as thou wilt." With that great
Nevertheless, the property of true faith alone,
he spanned the gulf throughout his life
between the almighty, unknowable God and
our finite humanity. He illuminated the souls
of his disciples also with this faith in a
heavenly Father. His greatest disciple, Paul,
moves us nowhere more powerfully and deeply
than when, following wholly in the spirit and
on the lines of the Gospel, he speaks of the
1 Matt. xi. 25.

1 1 6 Jesus

believers' sonship to God, of the Spirit who
bears witness that we are the sons of God.
The eighth chapter of Romans, especially the
second half, is like a splendid fugue on the
theme of the Fatherhood of God : " If God
is for us, who is against us ? " When Paul
strikes the keynote of joy in his epistles —
"Rejoice alway, and again I say unto you,
Rejoice" — when he glories in the sufferings
he has undergone, when in the New Testa
ment writings it is so often the Trapptjo-la, the
glad, free, confident courage that is extolled
as the chief virtue of the Christians, all this is
but the strong expression of the faith in a
heavenly Father which Jesus awakened in the
hearts of his disciples.

CHAPTER VII
The Last Judgment
Such was the preaching of Jesus and his faith
in God as seen in its kindly aspect. But
all this has a reverse side. The single word in
which the tradition summed up his preaching
was, " Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven
is at hand."1 The idea of the Kingdom of
God is directly connected in Jesus' mind with
that of the Last Judgment. When God came,
it would be to judge the world. Therefore his
preaching of the Kmgdom had not only its
benevolent, consolatory side, but also made
stern and exacting demands : Repent ye,
alter your whole frame of mind, that ye may
stand before God when He cometh.
1 Matt. iv. 17. ':' '
117

1 1 8 Jesus
With the idea of the Judgment Jesus again
comes into close and direct contact with the
rehgious feelings and conceptions of his time
and environment. Here too the later Jewish
piety had prepared the field for the Gospel.
The idea of God's Judgment had been the
central point of the prophetic utterances,
whether it was expected upon Israel and what
was evil and rotten in Israel, or upon the
enemies of the moment. It had undergone an
enormous extension during the later develop
ment of Jewish faith. The idea of a world-
judgment had gradually formed itself, for
Israel's arch-foe at the time of Jesus was of
course the world-empire of Rome, so that any
judgment upon that empire must become a
judgment upon all the nations of the earth.
Yet not only the nations should be judged,
according to this later Judaistic conception,
but all the hostile powers at work in this world,
the demons, and at their head that great an
tagonist of God, the Devil ; and not only upon
the present generation should God's judgment

The Last Judgment 119
fall, but the dead should rise to receive their
sentences, and these mighty events should be
accomphshed amid tremendous cataclysms of
the heavens and the earth. These ideas lay
deep in the heart of every pious Israelite, and
again and again do we find references in later
Jewish literature to the great and terrible Day
of the Lord, the last grand Judgment. And
each man had in his mind's eye the majestic
image of the Judge, as it had once been drawn
by the author of the Book of Daniel : the
Ancient of Days, with snow-white hair, sitting
surrounded by hosts of angels upon a throne
from which streams of fire gushed forth. Yet
this Jewish idea of the Judgment was subject
to one important limitation : it remained
entirely national. However widely it was
extended in all directions, its central core was
still formed by the hope that the world-power
hostile to Israel would be annihilated and the
faithful Israel reinstated in his rights. It is
true that among the devout the expectation of
a judgment upon the godless section of their

120 Jesus
own people occupied a foremost place. The
devout felt themselves to be only a part of the
nation — and indeed usually the weakest part,
— yet they alone should come to their rights
at the Judgment, while the rest should have
judgment only. But here it was merely the
fanaticism of a sect or a party that had taken
the place of, or rather ranged itself beside, the
national hopes and passions. In the eschato
logical reflections of Israel it is always a case
of " the godly " or " the godless " as a class ;
the individual does not place himself alone and
naked before the idea of the Judgment, but
shelters himself behind the group to which he
belongs, or reassures himself by the conscious
ness that he is one with his sect. The pre
vailing instinct among pious Israelites is the
corporate one of the "nine-and-ninety righteous
men," — that feeling which the Baptist had
already scourged : " Begin not to say within
yourselves, We have Abraham for our father ;
for I say unto you that God is able of these
stones to raise up children unto Abraham."

The Last Judgment 121
Now there can be no doubt that Jesus
adopted the more advanced ideas of later
Judaism. Like the rest of his time, he
looked for the final judgment of God upon the
whole world, that is, upon all the nations and
upon the Devil and his hosts ; he looked for
the resurrection of the dead and the great
decision of Heaven or Hell for all. In all
these matters, however, he showed an unusual
reserve, and he never gave any connected
picture of his own conception of the end of the
world and of the Judgment. The great
majority of the prophecies in the thirteenth
chapter of Mark and its parallels are probably
only the product of the Christian community,
as is also the great parable of the Son of
Man separating all the nations before his
throne to the right hand and to the left.1 It
was contrary to his inmost nature to give
such a detailed picture in all its stages of the
events of the Last Day ; he was no painter of
the colossal. He protested against the pre-
1 Matt. xxv. 31 ff.

122 Jesus
tensions and the efforts of Jewish apocalyptics
to calculate the end by the signs of the times.
No man could tell the day and hour: the
coming of the Kingdom was not to be reckoned
beforehand. Indeed he lays all his emphasis
upon the sudden coming of the end. It would
come like a thief in the night,1 like a destroy
ing flood, like the judgment in the time of
Noah and of Lot, like the lightning flashing
across the heavens.2 Therefore all disciples of
Jesus must be true and wakeful at all moments.
They must stand ready with loins girded and
lamps burning,3 for the Lord may come at any
hour of the night. In other respects too he
shows a remarkably sober restraint in his
description of the last things, especially in that
of the respective conditions of the godly and
the godless after God's Judgment. With a few
brief strokes he indicates the essential points,
but only so far as they may serve to impress
upon his disciples and hearers the importance
1 Matt. xxiv. 43 ff. ; Luke xvii. 26 ff.
2 Luke xvii. 24. 3 Luke xii. 35 f.

The Last Judgment 123
of the great decision. In many points of
detail we are left quite in the dark as to his
real views. We do not even know, for
instance, whether he presupposed a general
resurrection of the dead or merely a resurrec
tion of the righteous.1 When we compare
Jesus' utterances concerning the Last Things
with the broad scene-painting of Jewish apoca
lyptics, or the discourses of Mahomet, with
their repulsive descriptions of heaven and hell,
there rises before our eyes a conviction of the
serene greatness, moral and rehgious, and the
clearness and earnestness of such a mind, which
could confine itself so closely to the absolutely
needful. While, however, Jesus' preaching was thus
based, generally speaking, on the ideas of the
Judgment as developed by later Judaism, in
one point he goes decidedly beyond them,
purifying, illuminating, and exalting them.
For as he detached the idea of the Kingdom
of God from the nation and the national hopes,
1 The latter view is supported by Luke xiv. 14, xx. 36.

124 Jesus
so at the same time he detached the idea of
the Judgment. What Jewish eschatology had
made the principal point — the judging of the
enemies of Israel and Israel's recovery of lost
rights — plays no part whatever in Jesus'
preaching of the Judgment. More than this,
he broke with the corporate instinct of his
devout contemporaries. With resolute deter
mination and inexorable clearness he set the
individual in the place of the nation, the party,
or the sect. In justice to the righteous, it ought
certainly to be borne in mind that even the
Jewish legalists had not wholly lost sight of
the conviction that the ultimate Judgment of
God would be concerned with the individual
and the individual alone. Here and there
among them the individualistic note is struck
clearly enough. But these isolated notes are
lost in the general battle-cry of " Israel here,
the Gentiles there: the righteous here, the
godless there ! " With unrivalled energy,
on the other hand, Jesus forced the opposite
conviction upon the souls of his disciples:

The Last Judgment 125
All depends upon you individually, he cried,
and upon you alone. You must render your
account before the living God ; there is
nothing behind which you can shelter and
conceal yourself. Two men shall be lying on
one bed : the one shall be accepted, the other
cast aside. Two women shall be grinding at
one mill : the one shall be accepted, the other
cast aside.1 The one sinner who turns and
repents is worth more in the sight of God
than the whole herd of the righteous.2 The
individual possesses in his life — which he must
keep pure against the Judgment of God — a
treasure compared to which all the treasures
of this world do not weigh in the balance.3
How the individual has traded with the talent
entrusted to him will be the test before God's
searching eyes.4
Now this is the point at which the religious
line in the preaching of Jesus meets the ethical.
For the thing which gives value to the indi-
1 Luke xvii. 34 f. 2 Luke xv. 7, 10.
3 Mark viii. 36. 4 Matt. xxv. 14 ff.

126 Jesus
; vidual on his trial before the eyes of God is
is
| simply and solely his moral good. God is
good, and therefore they who would find Him
must seek Him in the good. Thus the ethical
demands of Jesus are based entirely upon the
idea of the Judgment. Whether expressed or
not, there lies in reality behind all his moral
exhortations the idea that man will have to
answer for his deeds before God's great
tribunal. He alone is to be feared, the God
who has power to cast into Hell, but not any
of His creatures. He alone must also be
obeyed. The knowledge that all Jesus' moral
demands were based upon and prompted by
the idea of reward and punishment in the
Last Judgment ought not to frighten us. It
is true that we often hear it laid down from
the standpoint of Kantian rigorism that the
ethics of Jesus stand on a lower plane because
of their prevailing idea of reward, that in fact
they are " eudaemonistic." In any case, how
ever, they are very far removed from the

The Last Judgment 127
really dangerous, sensual eudEemonism which
consists in measuring the value of ethical
actions by the standard of ordinary utility
or of sensual pleasure. Jesus' ultimate con
ception of reward and punishment was one pre
eminently spiritual, supersensual, and ideal.
The reward he preaches is, virtually speaking,
existence in the sight of God, nearness to
God, and the punishment, rejection by God,
removal from His presence. All else that
he occasionally speaks of — the joys of Heaven
or the torments of Hell — belongs to the easily
detachable form or shell. The man to whom
the so-called eudasmonistic foundation of Jesus'
moral demands will appeal at all, must indeed
be one who already hves in the supersensual
and the ideal, in a world beyond the ordinary
utility of the day, and the pleasures, more or
less refined, of the senses. And if that is
so, the reward of the Gospel will not be to
him a mere outward remuneration, but an
inward acceptance and recognition, an en
couragement and confirmation in what he

128 Jesus
already has ; it will be a spiritual necessity.
Moreover, Jesus saved the Gospel idea of
reward from the special danger by which
Pharisaism was beset — the spirit of bargaining
and haggling with God and of boastful reliance
on one's own merit. In the easiest and simplest
way he combines the idea of reward with the
overwhelming consciousness of the divine
goodness and mercy. The servant who had
done all that was commanded him1 had yet
only done his duty ; he had no claim on any
recompense, or on the personal gratitude of
his Lord. If the all-powerful God gives
Himself in blessed nearness to those of His
children who have served Him faithfully, that
in itself is an overflowing and all-sufficient
good, to which man cannot lay claim as his
just reward. When we have done all, let us
still say : We are servants. We can but
admire the infinite clearness and certainty
with which Jesus here surmounted the dangers
of the Pharisaic ethics of reward, — far more
1 Luke xvii. 7 ff.

The Last Judgment 129
surely and simply indeed than Paul, with all
the ingenious proofs by which he sought to
defend his doctrine of justification by faith
alone. Nevertheless we must learn to accept the
fact that the Gospel knows nothing of the
doctrine that man ought to do good for its
own sake. What the Gospel constantly re
peats is : Do good for God's sake, do good for
the sake of the eternal goal which God has set
you, and in the ever-present sense of responsi
bility before the great tribunal in which God
will cast the final balance of your life. In the
very heart of the Gospel lies, not the bloodless
image of the moral law, but the immovable
conviction that the individual personal hfe has
its goal and its consummation in God.

CHAPTER VIII
The Moral Teaching of Jesus
We have now to ask, What was the essential
content and the fundamental character of the
moral demands of Jesus ? The devout Jew of
Jesus' time found the substance of God's will
in the Mosaic law. Put with greater definite-
ness, then, the question runs : What attitude
did Jesus take Vup) towards the Mosaic law ?
The view that here too he identified himself
at first wholly with the feelings of the past is
quite consistent with the position he adopted
towards the national hopes of his day, the
ideas of the Kingdom of God and of the
Judgment. There can be no doubt that Jesus
accepted the sacred will of God as embodied
in the law with genuine conviction. To the
130

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 131
Scribe who asked him what he should do to
inherit eternal life, he answered : " What is
written in the law ? How readest thou ? "
And then: "This do, and thou shalt live."1
In the law he found the good and holy will
of God. It is true that he once said, " Except
your righteousness exceed the righteousness
of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye cannot enter
into the kingdom of Heaven " ; 2 but he con
sidered that these had falsified, defaced, and
defiled the holy Will of God by their tradition.3
He contended first and foremost for the Mosaic
law and the Old Testament against the
tradition, against what was " said to them of
old time."4 Nor can it be disproved that
Jesus, as the tradition reports, and possibly in
opposition to the thoughtless worldhngs who
pressed around him, uttered the words, " Think
ye that I came to destroy the law and the
1 Luke x. 25-28, and cf. Mark x. 17 ff.
2 Matt v. 20.
3 Mark vii. 6 ff.
* Matt. v. 21, etc.

132 Jesus
prophets? I came not to destroy, but to
fulfil." x
On a closer examination, however, a deep
gulf is observed between the law itself, pro
duct and growth of the period of declining
piety in Israel, and the spirit of Jesus' moral
precepts. Seen by the hght of day, Jesus'
belief that he rested on a foundation of the
law is in much the same case as Luther's,
that he was still a faithful son of the Catholic
Church when he had inwardly long broken
with her. Jesus believed that in his battle
with the fundamental moral ideas of the Scribes
and Pharisees he was only striking at the
tradition and its ramifications. In reahty,
however, he was striking at the law, upon
which not he, but his Pharisaic opponents,
actually based themselves. And in the heat of
battle the deeper antagonism did occasionally
reveal itself. In most of the great anti-
1 Matt. v. 17. These words, however, can scarcely have
stood traditionally at the beginning of the great " Sermon
on the Mount.'' They are an isolated paradoxical logion,
such as Luke xvi. 16 f.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 133
theses of the Sermon on the Mount it certainly
seems as if he were aiming not at the law, but
only at the tradition of his opponents. But
when Jesus opposed the commandment of " an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"
with the commandment of unqualified non-
resistance and forgiveness,1 it became manifest
that the spirit of the " higher righteousness "
was different in kind from that of the Mosaic
law, or at least of a part of it. When he
insisted so strongly upon the indissolubility of
marriage, he overrode a provision of the law
concerning divorce, of extreme importance to
the Scribes.2 When he announced that the
Sabbath was made for man, and not man for
the Sabbath,3 he threw over at least one side
of the Old Testament conception of the
Sabbath.4 And still more when he uttered
1 Matt. v. 38 ff.
2 Mark x. 2 f. ; Matt. v. 31. 3 Markii. 27.
4 This view is not altered by the fact that the rabbinic
doctors themselves occasionally made use of this principle
by way of justification in their casuistic treatment of the
law.

134 Jesus
the hard saying which even his disciples
thought a bold paradox, that nothing from
without the man going into him could defile
him,1 a whole revolution was implied against
the cleansing ordinances of the Old Testa
ment. The freedom with which Jesus treated
the details of the Mosaic law, while humbly
bowing to it as a whole, is perhaps best shown
by his challenging dictum on divorce. The
view he expresses certainly comes into con
flict with a particular ordinance of the Mosaic
law ; that he fully acknowledges. But, he
declares, Moses only made that ordinance
because of the people's hardness of heart, and
higher than the authority of Moses himself
stood the authority of God the Creator, who
ordained the indissolubility of marriage. Bold
indeed would have been the Scribe who
ventured on such an argument !
We find, then, that Jesus' attitude towards
the law was paradoxical ; for with all his in
ward freedom he maintained towards it an
1 Mark vii. 14 ff.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 135
attitude of reverent humility, and with all his
differences in detail, he clung firmly to his
agreement with it as a whole. The law was
and remained to him the holy Will of God,
but he heard in it only those notes to which
his ear was attuned.
In these circumstances the moral ideas
peculiar to Jesus will be more clearly per
ceptible if we consider, not the position he
took up towards the law, but the struggle he
maintained against what he himself sharply
distinguished from it — the legal tradition.
" Except your righteousness exceed the
righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye
cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven."
In what, then, did this higher righteousness
consist ? First and foremost, in concentration
upon the genuinely moral. Both Jesus and his
opponents started from the holy Will of God
as laid down in the Mosaic law. Yet how
differently did they conceive it ! The Scribes
and Pharisees wanted the " whole " law, with
all its ritual and ceremonial, its juristic and

I36 J

esus
constitutional ordinances. Of course they
wanted the moral side of it also, but only in
addition to a great deal else. And naturally
the moral side came off the loser. Jesus' soul,
on the other hand, was filled only with the
majesty of the moral law ; the rest he passed
by with indifference. He did not attack it ;
he left it where it was. Only when these
non-essentials threatened to hamper the essen
tial, he rose and struck down the rotten trash. ._
Then he entered the lists on behalf of the
inward purity before the outward, of right-
doing before Sabbath-keeping, of filial love
before sacrifice, of righteousness, mercy, and
truth before the tithe.1 Thus from the centre
outwards he accomplished the hberation of
the moral element in the law from its
accretions.
_„ . And with all this he insisted upon unity,
completeness, and reality. From the infinite
subdivision of the commandments of God in
the law, he led his hearers back to unity;
1 Matt, xxiii. 23.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 137
instead of the bewildering confusion of the
legal atmosphere, with its medley of great and
small, important and unimportant, he gave
them a whole. " Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour
as thyself." 1 "Whatsoever ye would that men
should do unto you, even so do ye also unto
them."2 The point is not that Jesus should
once have uttered and laid down these
principles. Similar sayings may be met with \
here and there among his rabbinic contem
poraries, and Jews and Judaists declare with
pride that Jesus here taught nothing new.
What matters is the vital energy, the unique
certainty, with which Jesus actually regulated
his own and his disciples' lives. Nowhere did
he tolerate a superficial juggling with the words
and commandments of God ; he was constantly
setting his disciples before the ultimate moral
realities, and constantly insisting upon the
personal element and upon that which gave its
true value to hfe, the love of God, expressing
1 Mark xii. 28 ff. 2 Matt. vii. 12.

138 Jesus
itself in the love of neighbour and of brother,
and in duty towards that self1 which was of
more value than all the world.
The law as interpreted by Pharisaism was
by its whole nature directed to the individual
action. This later Jewish law was in fact
also common law, and common law is of
necessity concerned with the individual action.
Such a combination of law, morality, and
religion is characteristic of the mental attitude
of Judaism. What Jesus did was to separate
them. He presses behind the individual
action to the disposition : " Make the tree
good, and its fruit also will be good."2 Out
of the abundance of the heart, he declared,
come the pure thoughts as well as those which
defile the man.3 Personal freedom, resting on
moral conviction, takes the place of all the
mass of casuistic, soul -fettering commandments.
According to a tradition preserved in an early
manuscript of Luke's Gospel, Jesus is made
1 He says, " Love thy neighbour as thyself."
2 Matt. xii. 33. 3 Matt. xii. 35 ; Mark vii. 21 ff.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 139
to say to a man who was working on the
Sabbath : " If thou knowest what thou doest,
blessed art thou ; but if thou knowest not,
thou art accursed and a transgressor of the
law."1 There is little reason to doubt that
Jesus uttered this bold word, which would
then have its echo in the Pauline phrase,
" Whatsoever is not of faith (i.e. of moral
conviction) is sin."2 But whether it is his or
not, his whole life and his whole person are
an embodiment of freedom based on moral
conviction. In this struggle against Pharisaism on behalf
of the unity, completeness, inwardness, and
freedom of all moral effort, Jesus was swayed
by One strong fundamental feeling — his passion
for truth and reality. Not only a subjective
love of truth inspired him, but an instinctive
feeling for the practical and the real. Hence
his invincible dislike of all conscious and un
conscious artificiality, of all clinging to the
superficial, the external, and the purposeless, of
1 In Codex D, at Luke vi. 4. 2 Rom. xiv. 23.

140 Jesus
all that was in reality mere trifling under the
mask of earnestness. In his gentle compassion
there was much that he could understand and
forgive, but when he ht upon these things,
his wrath flamed up : he could have no
fellowship with them, for he saw that they
were rotten to the core. And so hard did he
hit his opponents, that to-day we can almost
feel pity for them. There were but few
conscious impostors among them ; in then-
way they all meant it seriously. " I bear
them witness that they have a zeal for God,
but not according to knowledge," cries their
former greatest partisan.1 On the other hand,
Jesus had no choice but to contend with fervour
against a system which had unnerved its votaries
and deprived them of the sense of reality. For
where that is lost, all is lost ; God dwells in
the real, and he who has lost his sense of the
real will not find God. Thus in his war against
the Scribes and Pharisees Jesus appears as the
great champion of truth and reality.
1 Rom. x. 2.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 141
Still deeper than this conscious antagonism,
however, between Jesus and Pharisaism, lies
what may rather be called the unconscious
and the unexpressed. We have already said
that the special characteristic of the ethics and
religion of later Judaism was their intimate
connection with law. The relation between
God and the righteous, the righteous and his
neighbour, is here calculated on a legal basis to
the last detail, in a system of actions and
counter-actions. The sober, commonplace
and common-sense view of ne quid nimis is the
dominant principle. Everything is minutely
weighed and measured in a casuistic plan
which extends to the most trivial cases of
ordinary hfe. The negative spirit of prohibition,
the "Thou shalt not," is everywhere in the
ascendant, and the dignity of morality in its
positive form, endlessly driving man beyond
and outside himself, is never recognised.
We can only obtain the proper insight into
Jesus' moral atmosphere when we realise that
he pressed in the opposite direction to Phari-

142 Jesus
saism in partially unconscious antagonism to
it, and, let us frankly confess, to the length of
uncompromising one - sidedness. What he
preached was the ethics of heroism, of absolute,
unquestioning enthusiasm. Only from this
point of view can we understand the spirit of
the Sermon on the Mount, which his pious
followers put together out of his sayings.
We can now understand, too, why Jesus
would have nothing to say to ordinary law and
the legal point of view. His whole nature
was set to higher things. To the legal principle
of the Old Testament, " An eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth," he opposed the com
mandment not to resist evil in any circum
stances. To the young man who appeals to
him in his dispute with his brother, he replies
with a stern refusal.1 When Jesus saved the
woman taken in adultery 2 from popular justice,
1 Luke xii. 13 f.
2 John vii. 53- viii. 11. According to our best manu
scripts, this passage about the woman taken in adultery
did not originally stand here. It is a piece of genuine but
extra-canonical tradition.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 143
by appealing to the highest moral standards,
we can clearly perceive, in spite of our admira
tion for the grandeur of the scene, that his
magnificent and unbounded moral one-sided-
ness did constitute a danger to the maintenance
of law and order. It is the clash of two worlds
whose limits will not always be easy to
define. But what Jesus had to do was to
break a passage for the higher moral view, to
liberate this higher world from the lower one
of every day. And there even one-sidedness
may be in season.
The antagonism between the deeper moral
conceptions of Jesus and the legal and casuistic
world of the Pharisees is amply illustrated by
the splendid irony with which he occasionally
imitates their manner in his own maxims : " I-
say unto you that every one who is angry with
his brother shall be in danger of the judgment
(or petty tribunal), and whosoever shall say to
his brother " Raca," shall be in danger of the
council (or higher tribunal) ; and whosoever
shall say " Thou fool," shall be in danger of

1 44 Jesus
the hell of fire." x We can see now why Jesus
was so fond of laying down the commandment
of God in all its absoluteness in the face of this
endless system of distinctions and exceptions.
To one who has studied the Pharisaic casuistry
of oaths and marriage, it will not be surprising
that Jesus demanded, in his heroic manner, that
swearing should be altogether eschewed, and
4 that marriage should never and in no circum
stances be dissolved.2 The enlightened and
sensible interpretation certainly is that there
might still be ultimate exceptions, and that
Jesus himself occasionally made an exception,
e.g. in the case of his prohibition of swearing.
But Jesus hated exceptions ; placed as he was,
he was bound to fight hard for the inviolable
earnestness of the moral view, whose existence
was endangered by the quibbles of the law.
The ethics of Pharisaism are embodied in
1 Matt. v. 22.
2 The words, " except for adultery," Matt. v. 32, are an
interpolation ; cf. Mark x. 1 1 ff., Matt. xix. 1 ff., Luke xvi.
18. They are inconsistent with the absolute tone of Jesus'
ethics.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 145
prohibition and in the exact limitation of the
moral law. Jesus' whole tone is positive ; he
tells his disciples what they are to do, and he
is fond of awakening their souls to the un
limited vastness of the moral law. If the
Jewish commandment ran: "Whatsoever ye
would that men should not do unto you, do it
not unto them," Jesus said : " Whatsoever ye
would that men should do unto you, do it also
unto them." Though this difference may at
first sight seem insignificant, we are justified
in paying it some attention. The Jewish com
mandment lies in the province of calm and
reasonable reflection, whereas the moral world
of Jesus, as revealed in his sayings, becomes
absolutely limitless. He continually lays
stress upon the unboundedness of the moral
obligation. It is not enough to forgive one's
brother seven times : it must be seventy times
seven.1 The commandment knows no limits ;
these duties must be fulfilled at once, without
thought or hesitation, without "if" or "but."
1 Matt, xviii. 21 ff. IO

146 Jesus
The morally perfect man must allow nothing
to stand in the way, not even the so-called
service of God.1 And as Jesus extends our
obligations into the scale of the infinite, so on
the other hand he pursues them into their
minutest details of word and disposition, in
both directions opening up an immeasurable
field. When he speaks of his disciples'
duty towards themselves, it is the same thing
over again. Everything must be sacrificed in
order not to lose oneself. Even a part of that
self should be forfeited, hand or foot cut off or
an eye plucked out, in order to enter into the
Kingdom of God.2 All values in the world
cannot outweigh man's proper self. In short,
the infinitude of Jesus' moral ideal may best
be summed up in the saying, " Be ye there
fore perfect, even as your heavenly Father is
perfect." 3 An inconceivably bold demand,
filling our souls with dismay. Man the finite
is to direct his strivings towards becoming
1 Matt. v. 23 f. ; Mark xi. 25.
2 Mark ix. 43, 47 ; Matt. v. 29 f. 3 Matt. v. 48.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 147
perfect as the eternal and infinite God, and by
his strong and unerring moral power he is to
enable himself to smile at all obstacles and
provocations, and even to love his adversary and
to treat him with kindness. In this sphere of
highest and divinest enthusiasm, filled with
God's spirit and pressing on into the very
presence of God, lies the commandment to
" love your enemies." x
Heroism, enthusiasm — here was the keynote
of Jesus' morality. It meant a boundless de
votion to the sacred Will of God, which knew
neither condition nor exception, and was
continually urging man on from task to task
and leaving him no rest ; it meant the forcible
liberation of the moral element from all the
ignobler things which had twined themselves
almost indissolubly around it, and the final
extrication of the moral law in all its sternness
and majesty. When Paul represented the
moral life of the Christian as the work of
the miraculous Spirit of God ever driving him
1 Matt. v. 44 f.

148 Jesus
on, he had found an excellent formula for the
very essence of Jesus' moral teaching. For to
act morally is to act heroically, in the rush of
enthusiasm and under the stress of a divine
power not our own.
The effect of it all is, moreover, greatly
strengthened by the eschatological colour
of his preaching. The last links of the chain
here fall into their place. We have seen that
the great idea of the Judgment was the
foundation of his moral demands. The
Judgment is at hand, he cried, God is at
hand. It was because he felt so unshakably
convinced of the advent of God that there
existed for him no other reality than that of
this infinite and holy Will of God, which held
the soul of man in trembling unrest, and to
which all quibbling was hateful. That was
why he cried, " Repent ye, for the kingdom of
God is at hand." Wherever he turned he saw
that a moral upheaval from the very founda
tions, a complete liberation from the inferior
and the trivial, and a mighty aspiration towards

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 149
the newly opened realms of the divine Will
were the first necessities if God were not to
come with destruction in His hand.
It may be seen from the foregoing that a
mere plain statement of the moral ideas of
Jesus is an impossibility. We must recognise
that he stands in a wholly unique position, that
in that position God gave him something
wholly unique to say, and that he said it in all
its nakedness and its terrible earnest. To en
deavour to imitate him in every detail would
be a presumptuous enterprise, an attempt of
the ordinary man to measure himself against
the hero. He is, and must remain, beyond our
reach. In one aspect, indeed, the moral world of
Jesus seems to us strange, and appears to
show some flaw. In all his moral demands
his gaze is directed exclusively towards God
and the individual. The subsistence of the
individual before God's tribunal is the point
which alone seems to be of any importance in
his eyes. His ethics are the ethics of lofty

150 Jesus
individualism. Beside these two entities of
God and the individual everything else sinks
into the background. No account is taken of
the history of man as a whole or of the con
nected labour of the human race in the wider
or narrower forms of its social life — marriage,
the family, society, the state, the nation.
• Jesus makes his moral demands as if the indi
vidual stood free and naked before God, ab
solved from all these relationships and custom
ary standards — except as regards the direct re
lationship of man to man, — as in fact Jesus and
his disciples in their wandering life lived free
from all such forms and relationships. And in
addition to this we have Jesus' expectation of
an approaching millennium, or at least of a
great disruption of all existing circumstances.
The whole labour of the world in the nation,
the state and the forms of legal and social life,
the labour in which generation succeeds
generation like the links in a chain, was to
him incapable of producing anything more of
permanent value. Nor should it be forgotten

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 151
that Jesus grew up far removed from any real
culture, among a ruined and hopeless people
utterly deprived of all great aims. The actual
roots of his anti- worldly ethics do not perhaps
he there ; the lofty, individualistic morality
of Jesus had, as we have seen, its own roots
and would still have existed if he had grown
up among other outward circumstances and
with other expectations ; for such a purely
religious and unworldly view of things is quite
conceivable even when detached from these
particular conditions. But they certainly
served to encourage that fundamental bias of
Jesus' moral nature ; they provided the form,
exclusively religious and anti-worldly, in which
it slowly moulded itself.
Here and there, no doubt, Jesus gave his
attention to various sides of the social life of
men, sometimes even directly attacking or
abrogating them. He spoke golden words on
the inviolability and sacredness of marriage.
His eye kindled, grave and other-worldly as
he was, at the sight of children. His saying,

152 Jesus
"Render unto Csesar the things that are
Cassar's, and unto God the things that are
God's," has gone through the centuries making
the history of man. Nevertheless these are
details, crumbs that fall from the rich man's
table, and no one will seriously assert that the
strongest side of his moral work lay here.
Considered as a whole, Jesus absolved both
himself and his disciples from the life of
marriage, the family, and the profession, and
only poured forth the full treasures of his
personality when released from such conditions.
He forbade all care for the morrow, and not
only restless, untrusting care, but all kinds of
calculation and planning beforehand, which
are necessary to every worldly calling on a
larger scale.1 Wealth he held to be at
the very least fraught with danger to the
soul.2 As we have already seen, he would
never have much to do with law, even
in its proper place. He lived in an
atmosphere where law frequently meant
1 Matt. vi. 19 ff, esp. ver. 34. 2 Mark x. 23 ff.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 153
nothing but force and oppression, and where
his fellow-countrymen were on the whole glad
to have as few dealings with the law and its
courts as possible. The government was, in
his eyes, a power belonging to this world, to
which one owed obedience so long as one had
deahngs with the world. But regarded from
the highest point of view, it was morally of
little value. "The kings of the Gentiles
have lordship over them, and their oppressors
are called benefactors ! " 2 He separated his
hopes and his faith from the thought of his
people's doom ; he stared the terrible certainty
of their destruction in the face, and fled for
refuge to a higher atmosphere, while this world
and its labour, even the labour devoted to
loftier aims, faded into oblivion beside his
soul's thirst after God.
We are bound to recognise these facts, and
to acknowledge freely that in this respect we
can no longer simply imitate and endorse the
1 Luke xxii. 25 : another instance of irony in the sayings
of Jesus.

154 Jesus
practice of Jesus. The progress of events — to
submit to which is also part of the service of
God, since God is manifested in it— has
brought the labour of the world and the
discharge of its tasks very near to us as a
moral duty, nay, has forced it upon us. The
evolution of Christianity has followed in its
wake, and it is through the Reformation and
the act of Luther that a glad, confident
appreciation of the labour of the world in its
moral aspect has again been made possible
to us. We no longer live in imagination at
the latter end of a decaying world. The
supersensual realm of God, with its eternal
ideas, has grown into and around this finite
world-labour of ours in ways that were quite
unknown to the age of Jesus. The boundaries
of the world and the Kingdom of God have
become subtler, vaguer, and more fluid.
But when this is said, has the whole moral
attitude of Jesus httle or nothing left to give
us ? On the contrary, it has the ultimate and
highest gift. Jesus tells us what is, after all,

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 155
the fundamental, vital thing amid all our
confused toilings : that the individual or
individuals can find the living God, that the
individual must lead his life under an earnest
sense of responsibihty before the great eyes of
God, free from all thought of outward success
and unfettered by the judgment of men ;
that he must find his stay and support in the
strong and beneficent Will of God, as well as
his guarantee for the freedom and indepen
dence of his personality in the midst of this
/ world's toil ; that he exists here on earth only
in order to become fitted for eternity. If
Jesus sought this ultimate goal and impressed
it on the souls of his disciples while standing
outside the ordinary course of the world, he
may seem to us strange and inaccessible in
this latter respect, but all the more clearly
does he hold up the mark towards which our
lives are bound to strive even within the limits
of our worldly labour.
But, it may be said, does not a deep gulf
still yawn between our life, encompassed as it

156 Jesus
is by the affairs of this world and devoted to
culture or to professional work, and the anti-
worldly practice of Jesus and his first disciples ;
so that the question would again arise whether
the community of ultimate aim could be main
tained in spite of these fundamental differ
ences ? I do not think so. These two different
worlds meet at any rate in one point. Jesus
continually emphasised as distinctly as it is
possible to do so the root idea that the
individual only grows and matures through
human intercourse, without which there can
be no highest life, and that God Himself
is only to be found in the love of one's
neighbour and the moral effort which that
love entails. With the same energy with
which he directed the souls of his disciples
towards God, he directed them towards
personal intercourse ; he did not, like Buddha,
throw them back finally upon themselves, but
bound them in close, lasting, and intimate
communion with himself and one another.
And since he insisted that the highest good

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 157
lay in moral work in the community which
he wove between person and person, it is in
evitable that all the necessary forms of the
social life of man should gradually be re
established, nay, should for the first time be
rated at their true value. The Gospel, the
moral teaching of Jesus, does not lead to the
cloister doors, like the religion of Buddha; -
ultimately it must surely approve the forms
of human society, because it approves with its
whole being the moral forces which the latter »
brings to light.
Thus Jesus finally reveals to us by his
teaching the true and ultimate Will of God.
In his heroic stature and his absolute self-
devotion, in his exclusive insistence upon the
highest and the best and his scorning of any
thing less, he stands perhaps at an unattainable
distance from us, and even shows an unbend
ing sternness, nay, an awfulness before which
we shrink. We cannot presume to measure
ourselves against the hero. Yet he remains
the conscience of his followers ; his words are

158 Jesus
still the thorn which allows them no rest.
With unwavering clearness he points out the
way which we must follow, even if he himself
is far beyond our reach.
Yet the sternness and earnestness of Jesus'
moral demands have a reverse side, without
which he and his preaching might indeed be
called terrible : he proclaimed the forgiveness
of sins and a sin-forgiving God. He did not
only lay upon his disciples the heavy burden
of his moral exactions, but taught them also
to pray daily, "Father, forgive us our tres
passes." Contemporary Judaism is also pos
sessed with this idea of the forgiveness of sin
and debt. " Forgive us, O our Father, for we
have sinned ; forgive us, O our King, for we
have done wrong," — so prayed the pious
Israehte day by day, perhaps already at the
time of Jesus, certainly soon afterwards,
Later Jewish literature is full of prayers of
repentance and confessions of sin which are
often moving and beautiful. And yet their
writers could never become truly sure and

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 159
confident of their sin-forgiving God. All the
artificial striving of the law, with its heaping-
up of externals round true piety, bears witness
to the contrary. And how indeed could any
one have had faith in such a sin-forgiving,
merciful God when he himself was practising
for rehgion's sake unmercifulness, unforgiving-
ness, and forgetfulness towards his neighbour ?
In proportion as the pious Jew's longing for
the forgiveness of sins found freer and freer
expression, he yielded more and more com
pletely to the tendency towards exclusiveness
and towards a haughty contempt and hatred
of all who were not as he was. He despised
the Greeks and hated the Romans, he lived in
a state of bloody feud with the Samaritans, and
extended his enmity and hatred to all Israelites
who, from whatever grounds, did not share his
isolation — viz., the sinners and godless who
had dealings with the Gentiles, and the
publicans who made their living out of the
blood-money which enriched the pagan over
lords. The Pharisee hated and despised the

160 Jesus
" Amhaarez " — the uneducated common folk
who could not read and study the Scriptures,
and could not therefore apply themselves
seriously to the fulfilment of the law — and
held himself scrupulously aloof from any con
tact with them. Now Jesus immediately
took up a line of decided and refreshing
opposition to this whole tendency. Even the
popular verdict recognised in this respect the
unwonted and peculiar manner of Jesus : " He
eats with publicans and sinners," cried the
multitude.1 He made no advances to the
party of devout exclusiveness, but went from
the very first among the despised and unedu
cated masses, among the publicans and sinners,
the children of this world, whom good society
had spurned and cast out and given up for lost.
The Gospels also tell us that he was friendly
to the Samaritans,2 and he has certainly
raised them an undying monument in one of
his finest parables.3 All this he did quite
1 Matt. xi. 19.
2 Luke ix. 51 ff. ; xvii. lift". 3 Luke x. 30 ff.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 161
naturally and of his own free will, as though
it could not be otherwise. Far from the
streets and the high-roads, where the herd of
the pious took their way, Jesus went about
seeking the lost and strayed who had no
power to right themselves. And even when he
came across wholly lost and fallen souls — a
prostitute or an adulterous wife — he turned
to them with gentle kindness. He could do
so without relaxing the earnestness of his
moral tone, because he was strong, and be
cause no impure atmosphere was capable of
sullying his purity. Here indeed he won
his proudest triumphs. The most wonderful
thing about him was, after all, that he who
made such stern, serious, and austere demands
upon his disciples could be so full of mercy
and of womanly kindness when he found a
human soul impotently wresthng with sin.
He in whose sight no man could do enough
was content with the first weak signs of the
right will ; he who set so infinitely high a
standard could take pleasure in the first
n

1 62 Jesus
stumbling steps made on the unwonted road.
He came to cast fire on the earth, and he re
joiced in each faint spark of the divine that
gleamed up in a human soul. Hence it was
that he could grasp with fullest confidence
the idea of the sin-forgiving God, and could
implant the same confidence in the souls of
His disciples. Here at last his preaching
touches its chmax. In the loveliest of his
parables, which have gone down the ages in
undying freshness, exerting their unbroken
influence on the souls of a battling humanity,
Jesus celebrated this sin-forgiving God, now
as the father who receives his lost son with
strong, unwavering love and even with re
joicing, and now as the almighty God in
whose eyes the one sinner who repents is
worth more than the nine-and-ninety righteous
who need no repentance. Thus the Gospel
becomes the religion of ethical liberation, for in
its very centre lies the belief in the release and
unfettering of the will for good by the forgive
ness of sins.

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 163
Jesus was, moreover, quite conscious of the
fact that this faith in a sin-forgiving God must
go hand in hand with man's general moral
conduct, and indeed could not exist without it.
" Forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive
them that trespass against us." In oft-
repeated phrases Jesus made it clear to his
disciples that only the merciful could have
faith in a merciful Father, and that belief in a
sin-forgiving God was impossible to a hard
and unforgiving heart.1
Finally, let us observe once more the root
characteristic of the message of Jesus, express
ing itself so constantly here and elsewhere.
Let us observe how intimately and in what
mutual dependence the moral and the religious
are interwoven throughout his preaching.
His faith becomes inconceivable detached from
his morahty, and conversely the latter is only
conceivable on the ground of his faith. The
rehgious and moral forces are intertwined in
endless harmony ; a freed religion and a freed
1 Matt. v. 7, vi. 14 f., vii. 1 ff., xviii. 23 ff. ; Mark xi. 25.

1 64 Jesus
morality join in indissoluble alhance and flow
on in one strong, united stream. Both, how
ever, find their ultimate goal in the personal
relation. The Gospel was in the highest and
most perfect sense a personal religion. Every
thing in it is concerned with the personal and
the spiritual. Its central point is faith in the
living God, who holds communion with man
only through the spiritual and personal, never
through the material. Jesus' detachment of
religion from the nation and the national hopes
means simply that the individual, i.e. the
moral personality, now assumes the position
of paramount importance. Jesus regarded the
Judgment no longer as a judgment upon
certain nations, parties, and sects, but upon the
individual. The life of the individual, placed
directly before God's tribunal and burdened
with an immense responsibility, gains an
eternal and immeasurable significance. Jesus'
moral requirements too, freed from all com
plications of cult and ceremonial, are entirely
directed to the individual. The evil from

The Moral Teaching of Jesus 165
which Jesus saves his disciples here and now
is, above all, the moral evil of sin and debt
which each man has to bear for himself; and
that release is not effected by material means,
but only by the free and personal will of the
living God, and by the faith of those whose
sins are forgiven them. The personal rehgion
of the Gospel of Jesus may indeed be summed
up in the words : " What doth it profit a man
to gain the whole world and lose his own
soul ? "

BOOK III
the mystery of the person
CHAPTER IX
Jesus and the Messiahship
Who was Jesus himself, and who did he
believe himself to be ? These are the last.
questions that remain ; the last and the
hardest. For if we have felt some con
fidence till now that on the whole we
were standing on firm ground, in spite of
many uncertainties of detail, and in spite of
the fact that our reports of the sayings of
Jesus are only at second hand, at this point the
ground begins to give way beneath our feet. In
the reports of our first three Gospels, we shall
only be able to distinguish w^th^iffi^ulty, and
perhaps often not at all, between what was
the belief and conviction of the Christian
166 "

Jesus and the Messiahship 167
community on this point, and what was -the
opinion of Jesus himself. At any rate we
have definite proof that here too the faith of
his followers gilded and coloured the real
image of Jesus. For the point of view from
which they painted it was throughout that of
faith, and not that of historical accuracy.
All that can be attempted here is to sum
up the few fairly well-established conclusions
which have been reached as the result of long
and laborious investigation. In so doing we
must expect to be accused by the one side of
accepting too much, and by the other of
accepting too httle as satisfactorily estab
lished. Nevertheless the attempt must be
made. One of these conclusions, which seems now
to be definitely assured, in spite of con
tinual discussions in which it is stiU frequently
disputed, is that Jesus considered himself
to be the : Messiah of his_jpeople. For
the Gospels this assumption is of course
self-evident. But that is not enough to secure

1 68 Jesus
the position. Every one of the Messianic
utterances of Jesus in our Gospels is disputed
on critical grounds, and many of them with
good reason. But there is a better starting-
point for our contention than any to be obtained
by citing individual passages of the tradition.
We have certain knowledge that the belief
existed from the very beginning among the
Christian community that Jesus was Messiah,
and, arguing backwards, we can assert that the
rise of such a belief would be absolutely in
explicable if Jesus had not declared to his
disciples in his lifetime that he was Messiah.
It is quite conceivable that the, first disciples
of Jesus, who by his death and burial had
seen all their hopes shattered and their behef
in his Messiahship destroyed, might have
returned to that belief under the influence of
their resurrection experiences, if they had
formerly possessed it on the ground of the
utterances and general conduct of Jesus. But
it would be wholly incomprehensible that that
belief should have originated in their hearts

Jesus and the Messiahship 169
after the catastrophe, for in that case we must
assume that those marvellous experiences of
the Easter days produced something com
pletely new in the disciples' souls by a process
of sheer magic, and without any psychological
preparation. And that we are unable to
assume precisely on the ground of our strictly
historical point of view.
From such a retrospective survey we con
clude, then, that Jesus must have regarded
himself in some form or other as the Messiah,
and must have imparted that conviction to his
disciples. On this assumption we shall have
no objections to make against a series of
otherwise unimpeachable testimonies of our
Gospels to the public assertion by Jesus of his
Messianic claims.
It seems then to be established, notwith
standing many arguments which have been
urged to the contrary, that at the end of his
life Jesus made his entry into Jerusalem as
Messiah, that in his public trial before the
high priest he solemnly acknowledged himself

170 Jesus
to be Messiah,1 and that _. Pilate... causfidJjie
words, " This is the King of the Jew^/'_to_be
inscribed upon his _cross. By far the best
explanation of the proceedings taken against
him is that he was regarded as a false Messiah.
It will be recognised more and more clearly as
time goes on that the criticism which attempts
to shake these well-established points of the
tradition merely succeeds in over-reaching itself.
Our Gospel narratives also give us an ex
ceedingly valuable piece of evidence. _as Jo
when Jesus first spoke of hi^JMejsiahship__tp
the disciples. They tell us — probably without
themselves realising the profound significance
of the event they narrate — that at Csesarea
Philippi, towards the end of his Galilean
ministry, Jesus put the question, " Who say ye
, that I am ? " to his disciples, and that Peter
answered with the confession, "Thou ar±_the
Christ. " Jesus thereupon charged them strictly
to keep their knowledge to themselves.2 This
1 For the historical objections to this scene, see above,
p. 16. 2 Mark viii. 27.

Jesus and the Messiahship 171
solemn and significant account can originally
— even if the fact was already obscured at the
time the Gospels were written — have meant
nothing else than that Jesus was here speaking
to his disciples for the first time about the
secret of his person, and that they on their
side acknowledged his Messiahship . now Jfor
the first time. Moreover we have every right
to regard this story as historically trustworthy.
It is one of the few narratives of the Synop-
tists in which the indications of place, and even
to a certain extent those of time,1 are given.
It was from the outset so valuable to the com
munity that even the indifferent outward
circumstances of time and place were preserved.
It relates something which couldnot possibly
have been invented by, and was even opposed
to the sense of, the later community. For the
latter the Messiahship of Jesus was the surest,
most self-evident, and most precious thing
1 The story is connected, at any rate in one direction, by
Mark ix. 2 ("after six days") with the transfiguration
episode.

172 Jesus
about him. How then could he have fore-
borne to speak of it till towards the end of his
life ? Wherever the community forged the
tradition out of its own consciousness, it
naturally made Jesus testify to his Messiah-
ship from the beginning. Witness the con
sistent representation of the fourth Gospel,1
and also occasional statements of the first three
Evangehsts, including Mark, according to
which Messianic utterances on Jesus' part
already occur at the beginning of his ministry,
in contradiction to the scene at Caesarea
Philippi.2 This paradoxical character of the
scene, when compared with the faith of the
community, is indeed the best guarantee of its
genuineness.3
1 According to the fourth Gospel, John the Baptist is
already aware that he is Messiah, as also are the first
disciples at their calling : i. 29, 45, 49 ff
2 Mark ii. 10, 19 f., 28.
3 I have not discussed W. Wrede's ingenious repudiation
of these views in Das Messiasgekeimnis in den Evangelien
(1901), because I do not consider his position tenable.
The essential point of his argument is that he seeks
to discover a consistent tendency in our Gospels

Jesus and the Messiahship 173
But it also confronts us with new problems.
Why did Jesus delay so long in speaking of
his Messiahship to the disciples? Why did
he then charge them so peremptorily to keep
it secret ? And why did he to all appearance
refrain from urging his claims in public until
the very end of his life, i.e. probably until his
entry into Jerusalem ? We can scarcely
assume that the conviction of his Messiahship
only gradually dawned in his own mind
towards the end of his life. In days when
failure followed hard on failure, when his soul
was filled with forebodings of suffering, death
and disaster, no room can be found for the
growth of such a consciousness. Then all the
force of his personality was needed to enable
him to cling to the idea, for the Messiahship
and suffering, the Messiahship and defeat or
even death, were mutually irreconcilable pro-
according to which Jesus intentionally concealed his
Messiahship during his lifetime, — a tendency resting
perhaps upon the historical fact that Jesus never wished
to be Messiah. The best refutation of Wrede is to be
found in J. Weiss's Das alteste Evangelium (1903).

174 Jesus
positions to the ordinary mind. In any case
he must already have been sustained by_the
conviction that he was Messiah by the time
he had reached the height of his success.
The question as to when it first arose in his
mind — whether before or during the course of
his ministry — may be left undecided, though
it seems to us highly probable . that the
tradition is right in dating Jesus' awakening
to the Messianic consciousness from_ the
moment of his baptism, that is, before the
opening of his ministry. For, when we are
told that at his baptism by John, Jesus saw in
spirit the heavens open and heard a voice
crying, " Thou art my son," the original
meaning of the passage — although possibly the
Evangelists themselves may not have realised
its full bearing — was that this was the first
awakening of Jesus to the sense that he was
the Son of God, or rather the Messiah. Since
we can discover no other point in his life at
which the Messianic consciousness first made
itself felt, we shall provisionally accept the

Jesus and the Messiahship 175
tradition and assume that the Messianic idea
filled his soul from the beginning of his
activity, even if it were only in the form of a
bold intuition.
But why then this profound and almost
timorous reserve ? In my opinion the answer
to this question lies only in one direction.
Jesus himself laboured under an insuperable
inward difficulty in the matter. He must
have been dominated by a deep and direct
sense of the inadequacy of the Messianic title
for that which he felt himself by his inner
most convictions to be. The Messianic idea
was part of the national hopes and the national
religion of Israel. The popular expectation
was of a heaven-sent king of. the line of David,
who should come as a mighty ruler, sword
in hand, to shatter the Gentile nations, to
annihilate Rome, and to set upjns_univ:ersal
dominion in Jerusalem, whence he would then
rule in wisdom and_jnercy, filled with the
spirit of God, over the righteous and over the
prostrate Gentiles. Even when the figureof

176 Jesus
this king was painted in supernatural colours,
and the Messiah was no longer expected as the
Son of David, but as a miraculous apparition
descending from heaven, the Judge of the
world clothed in God-like majesty, he still
remained the national king who was to
destroy the Gentiles. It is easy to see how
foreign this figure, glowing with the passions
of national fanaticism, must have been to
the whole nature and being of Jesus, and how
far from Messianic in this sense was his hfe and
work. Just as the popular ideas of the King
dom of God and of the Judgment were found
inadequate, when closely examined, as expres
sions of the message which Jesus brought, so
the Messianic title was inadequate and even
dangerous as an expression of the true
character of his personality. While Jesus
could still speak freely of the Kingdom of
God and of the Judgment, and could pour
the new wine into the old skins, he found
himself in an altogether different position in
adopting the title of Messiah. The Kingdom

Jesus and the Messiahship 177
and the Judgment were still things of the
future. But from the moment that Jesus
publicly assumed the name of Messiah, he
turned the future into the present, and, as
indeed history has shown, ushered in the
decisive final hour. The objection that
under these conditions Jesus might have
adopted a better method than mere silence,
by instructing his hearers openly in the
manner in which he wished his Messiahship
understood, shows a failure to appreciate the
inward delicacy and tenderness of his per
plexed self-consciousness, and, above all,, the
volcanic nature of the ground on which he
stood. An open claim to the Messiahship on
Jesus' part would have brought all the explosive
material which had gradually been fermenting
in the hearts of the expectant people to the
point of combustion, and must have banded his
opponents together in deadly enmity to his pre
tensions. And when once the fanatic spirit of
the mob was roused on one side or the other,
who could have arrested its mad career ?
12

178 Jesus
This view, however, is certainly open to one
objection. Why did Jesus associate himself
at all with Messianic hopes which were so
foreign to his inmost being ; why did he
not shun them altogether ? The answer is
that in another direction they were absolutely
necessary to him. Just as he could not
dispense with the ideas of the Kingdom and
the Judgment if he wished to make himself
intelligible to his countrymen, so he could
not dispense with the Messianic idea if he
wished to be intelligible to_himself. One
thing that stands out in the personality of
Jesus is the fact that he wished to be more
than a mere member of a band, even if the
band were that of the prophets. He felt
himself irresistibly drawn towards the extra-
ordinary and the unique. And, as we know,
he announced the approach of the Kingdom
of Heaven. According to the popular ideal,
however, this was inconceivable without the
Messiah, and thus he found his position de
cided for him. For he could not be content

Jesus and the Messiahship 179
with the role of a forerunner. He felt that he
stood in such closeness of communion with God
the Father as belonged to none before or
afterjhjm. He was conscious of speaking the
last and decisive word ; he felt that what he
did was final and that no one would come after

him. The certainty and simple force of his
work, the sunshine, clearness, and freshness of
his whole attitude rest upon this foundation.
We cannot eliminate from his personahty
without destroying it the trait of super-
prophetic consciousness, the consciousness of
the accomphsher to whose person the flight
of the ages and the whole destiny of his
followers is linked. And when Jesus wished
to give form and expression to this_conscious-
ness, and thereby to lift it from its state of
fermentation into one of clearness and stability,
the only possibility that presented itself to
him_w^s_that of the Messianic idea, — of that
figure of the kingly consummator standing at
the end of time, as popular imagination had
painted it with its earthly colours.

180 Jesus
Thus the Messianic idea was the only possible
form in which Jesus could clothe his inner
consciousness, and yet an inadequate form; it
was a necessity, but also a heavy burden which
he bore in silence almost to the end of his life ;
it was a conviction which he could never enjoy
with a whole heart.

CHAPTER X
The Son of Man
The difficulties with which Jesus was forced
to contend will become still plainer when we
consider the particular forms in which his
Messianic consciousness expressed itself. As
we have already indicated, the nature of the
Messianic hopes at the time of Jesus varied
enormously, oscillating between the poles of a
purely earthly and a supernatural conception.
Thus the best answer to the question, what
exact image Jesus formed in his own mind of
his Messiahship, will be found by turning our
attention to the Messianic titles and attributes
which he was wont to confer upon himself.
Yet in reahty there is only one such title
which enters seriously into consideration. He
181

182 J

esus
practically deprecated the name "Son of
David," which expressed the more earthly
side of the Messianic hopes,1 although he
may occasionally have allowed it, as the
tradition states, from the mouth of a third
person.2 Nor did he use the more general
title " Son of God," which has its origin in
certain words of the Old Testament, as a title
proper. The heavenly voice at his baptism,
says the tradition, cried " Thou art my son,"
and Jesus answered the high priest's question,
" Art thou the Son of God ? " in the affirm
ative.3 But when he himself rejoices that " no
one knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither
doth any know the Father, save the Son, and
1 The meaning of Mark xii. 35 ff. is a denial of the idea
that the Messiah must be the Son of David.
2 Mark x. 47 ; xi. 10.
3 It may be well to emphasise the fact that in the time
and milieu of Jesus the term " Son of God " meant simply
" God's chosen one," i.e. the Messiah. It should never be
connected (as it still is so often by the orthodox mind)
with the dogmas of the miraculous birth and the Eternal
Son, even though the title may already have borne a
deeper meaning in the eyes of our Evangelists, who were
writing from the standpoint of the Christian community.

The Son of Man 183
he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him," 1 the
antithesis between Father and Son here shows
that the word " Son " is not meant in the sense
of a title. No, according to the tradition of
our Gospels there is but one title — though
that one is of the utmost importance —
which Jesus certainly apphed to himself: that
of the Son of Man. In a large number of
passages Jesus speaks of himself in the third
person as the " Son of Man."
This term places us again before a difficult
and far-reaching problem, to which, especially
in recent times, an immense amount of labour
has been devoted. We shall again endeavour
to present our readers with the conclusions
which have to some extent been established
and accepted. Two pretty generally recognised
principles will serVe as starting-points. First,
it is now admitted by the majority of scholars
that the designation " Son of Man " is a true >
Messianic title. Almost everywhere that
Jesus calls himself the Son of Man in our
1 Matt. xi. 27.

1 84 Jesus
Synoptic tradition there follows some saying
which refers to his specifically Messianic
dignity, or at least to the unique position and
destiny of his person.1 Thus it occurs in
connection with utterances about his future
coming in glory to judge the world, or about
the miraculous powers which he was already
exercising upon earth ; and in contrast to this
we are told that the Son of Man must suffer
and die and must for the present live in
lowhness. | Always, however, the title serves
to emphasise something extraordinary, some
thing that applies only to his own person in
its peculiar calling, j \The second principle, on
the other hand, is that, etymologicalfy speaking,
the title " Son of Man," as spoken in Aramaic,
means neither more nor less than the word
" Man." j It was impossible to make any
distinction between the phrases " Son of
Man" and "Man" in the Aramaic dialect,
so that it is quite possible that in occasional
1 See esp. Mark ii. 10, 28; viii. 31, 38; ix. 9, 12, 31 ;
x. 33, 45 ; xiii. 26 f. ; xiv. 62.

The Son of Man 185
passages where this title appears in our Gospels,
Jesus did not intend to speak of himself as
the Son of Man, but only of man in general.1
It is indeed only from the sense and emphasis
of any given saying that the difference can be
ascertained. If, however, the term " Son of Man " is held
on the one hand to be a Messianic title, and
on the other is found to be synonymous with
the colourless word " man," we must conclude
that, if Jesus did apply this designation to
himself, he was merely adopting thereby a
previously coined Messianic term, which was
already endowed with a special meaning. The
most ordinary word can, when used termino-
logically, acquire a special meaning which does
not belong to it intrinsically, but is as it were
arbitrarily bound up with it. We .shall now
have to inquire, therefore, whether the Judaism
of that day was not already acquainted with a
title of " the Man " for the Messiah, and further,
\ I
1 One of the obvious instancies is Mark ii. 28 (and
possibly ii. 10).

1 86 Jesus
what ideas it embodied in that title. And in
effect we find that the literature of later Judaism
yields the answer to the riddle. In some of
these writings the coming Messiah is spoken of
as " one hke unto a man," or even simply as
" the Man." The expression occurs with par
ticular frequency in the so-called Similitudes of
the Book of Enoch, a decidedly Jewish docu
ment of the middle of the first century a.d. But
above all the famous passage in Daniel (vii. 13)
— "And behold, there came with the clouds
of heaven one like unto a son of man . . .
and there was given him dominion and glory
and a kingdom " — was generally interpreted as
early as the time of Jesus as referring to the
personal Messiah, although the author of the
Book of Daniel himself perhaps only wished it
to be understood as a symbol of the people of
Israel. In short, the title " Man " or " Son of
Man " for the Messiah was already in existence.
How it arose and what it originally meant
we need not here trouble ourselves to inquire.
Jesus himself did not inquire, but merely took

The Son of Man 187
over the title as he found it. It is, however,
of interest to note that this title represents a
perfectly definite conception of the Messiah.
This Messianic Man is no longer the earthly
king of the line of David, as popular imagina
tion painted him ; he is a supernatural figure,
he comes down from heaven, he was with
God from the beginning of the world, he appears
in the splendour of his divine glory, and he is
actually the Judge of the world, thus displacing
God Himself from that position. In adopting
this title, therefore, Jesus had a purpose in
view ; by its use he could define his Messianic
claims more narrowly and could brush aside
the coarser popular and national ideas of the
Messiah as the Son of David ; he could in fact
set up his claim to be Messiah in the super
natural sense of the Son of Man.
Here we must pause to consider certain
critical objections which have recently been
urged with ever-increasing force, and are indeed
partially j ustified. Many critics have expressed
the view that Jesus never did adopt the title

i88 J

esus
" Son of Man," and that it merely represents
the later tradition of the community. Where
Jesus simply spoke in the first person, they
consider that the Christian tradition inter
polated the title " Son of Man." It is not
unjustly argued that this continual speaking
in the third person seems unnatural in the
mouth of Jesus, and inconsistent with the
plainness and simplicity of his speech in other
respects. More than this, it is pointed out that
a comparison between our first three Gospels
actually proves that in many places the title
" Son of Man " was inserted by the later
Evangehst, where originally there had only
stood the word "I."1 Finally, it has been asked
how it was possible to ascribe to a human
being living the ordinary life of man on earth
these apparently fantastic claims to the dignity
of the Son of Man. For it must not be for
gotten that the Jewish conception of the Man-
Messiah embraced within itself the claims to
1 One of the best examples is afforded by Matt. xvi. 13
as compared with Mark viii. 27.

The Son of Man 189
pre-existence and the judgeship of the world,
whereas, according to the surest tradition of
our earliest Gospels, it never occurred to Jesus
to attribute a primaeval existence to himself,
and whereas we have good reason to assert, as
we shaU see below, that Jesus never made any
claim to be the future Judge of the world,
although our first three Gospels, following the
belief of the community, certainly represent
him as making it.
These objections are partially right, and in
face of them we shall only be able to maintain
the assertion that Jesus did call himself the
Son of Man with certain reservations.
We must in fact go a little further back in
order to obtain a clearer view. Our Gospel
tradition itself will set us on the right road,
albeit not without some contradictions and
inconsistencies. Roughly speaking, then, it
may be said that it places the utterances about
the Son of Man towards the end of the life of
Jesus.1 And it shows us with unmistakable
1 See the passages in Mark cited above, p. 1 84.

190 Jesus
clearness that the idea of the Son of Man was
intimately connected in his mind with the
dawning conviction of suffering and death.
The sayings about the return of the Son of
Man in glory are balanced with remarkable
closeness by the prophecies that he must
, suffer and die.1 It is true that the gravest
critical objections have been raised against
these prophecies. It has been argued that
they appear in a very monotonous way, and
that they are in reality no more than a greatly
abridged account of the Passion given in pro
phetic form. Nothing would have been more
natural and more conceivable than that the
Christian community should not have tolerated
the idea that death overtook their Lord un
awares, and should therefore have put into his
mouth detailed prophecies as to his future
destiny. One fragment of the tradition, how
ever, forms an impassable barrier to these con
tentions — the scene of Gethsemane, which no
follower could have invented, and which bears
1 Mark viii. 31 (38); ix. 9, 12, 31 ; x. 33.

The Son of Man 191
within itself the stamp of genuine history.
That scene shows that Jesus was not surprised
by his fate, but on the contrary that he went
to meet it with a full and complete conscious
ness of what lay before him. Here we have
no longer a mere vague foreboding, but know
ledge reaching almost to the point of certainty.
From the scene of Gethsemane, however, we
can argue backwards. Such a clear vision of
his fate and such resignation to the Will of
God can only have been won gradually by
sharp inward conflict. Stronger and stronger •
forebodings must have invaded his soul long
before Gethsemane. Nor indeed could it have
been otherwise. As the non-success of his
efforts among his own people became more
and more evident, as the conviction grew that
that people was hastening along the road to
destruction, rejected of God, so the goal of
his own life must have grown darker and
darker, and the presentiment ever stronger that
his labours would end in calamity. It is quite
possible and even probable that Jesus spoke to

192 Jesus
his disciples during his last days in Galilee of
his dark and bitter forebodings. If, as must
be admitted, the Gospel tradition has obliter
ated almost every individual and convincing
touch from its monotonously repeated pro
phecies, there are still a few passages in which
some piece of original and uninventable tra
dition lingers.1 But however that may be, it
is enough for us to know that we have good
reasons for upholding the historical truth of
the prophecies of suffering and death.
And herewith we shall arrive at a final
understanding of Jesus' conceptions, or, let us
say, his auguries, concerning the Son of Man.
It is in this connection that they find their
true place. In face of the threatening doom
of final failure, Jesus clung fast to the Daniehc
prophecy of the Son of Man, and applied it to
himself. The form in which, with death and
failure before his eyes, he still maintained
his faith in his cause and in his God, was to
, declare to himself, his friends, and his foes that
1 Mark viii. 31 f . ; x. 32.

The Son of Man 193
after his death he would return in glory as
the Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven.
This gives us the necessary limitations
within which it is possible to maintain the
use by Jesus of the title " Son of Man " ;
and with them the objections raised above
disappear of their own accord. The title
" Son of Man " cannot have been used as a
regular and constant self-designation by
Jesus. Not until the end of his life, and then
only briefly and sparingly, did he adopt the
name. Probably he did not speak of his hopes
in that respect with any greater certainty, but
rather in the same dark, allusive, and forebod
ing terms as he employed when speaking of
his death, his sufferings, or his failure.
The stereotyped way in which the Synop-
tists represent Jesus as using the title "Son
of Man " is not historical. There speaks, not
the earthly Jesus, but the dogmatic conviction
of his followers. Yet this constantly repeated
use of the title by the tradition is best ex
plained on the supposition that it is based on
13

1 94 Jesus
a few genuine words of Jesus, while the fact
that the mysterious title never appears in the
narrative part of the Gospels, but always in
the sayings of Jesus, would otherwise have
no explanation. The process by which it
gradually spread from these few passages
of genuine tradition into so many of the
words of Jesus would then be partially
revealed by the Gospels themselves. Nor
can we regard his own use of the title as
artificial, when we consider that it was only
at rare moments of the deepest emotion,
when the super-earthly figure of the Messiah
rose before his soul like a new and strange
apparition, that he spoke of himself in these
terms. Finally, if Jesus only caught at the
idea of the Son of Man in this semi-prophetic
way, it would be easy to understand why
he did not adopt its full content, including
the ideas of pre-existence and of his own
Judgeship of the world ; to him the idea
of the Son of Man meant only one thing —
his return in glory.

CHAPTER XI
Conclusion
Tortuous paths are these that we have tried
to follow in the soul-life of Jesus, and hence
it is but dimly and uncertainly that we have
been able to trace them. One thing only
stands out still more clearly than before, —
how insufficient and even dangerous to the
true being of Jesus were these Messianic
ideas. The expectation at which his brood-
ings finally landed him, that he would
return in the immediate future upon the
clouds of heaven, surrounded by his angels —
how foreign it sounds to us ! History itself,
with its irrevocably different course, has
stepped in here, sifting and winnowing.
And yet we must not forget that behind
'95

196 Jesus
this transient form a lofty and eternal truth
lies hidden. The idea of the Son of Man
was the outward means by which Jesus rose
superior to his fate, and enabled himself,
and above all his disciples, to hold fast to
their faith in his person and his cause even
beyond the grave. This adoption of the idea
of suffering and death side by side with his
personal conviction — which still remained
unshaken — that he was called and sent by
God, was a truly immense achievement,
precisely because the form in which he held
the conviction of his divine mission was
that of the Messianic consciousness. There
was something horrible and unheard-of about
the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah to
the minds of Jesus' contemporaries. Nor
could he find it expressed anywhere in the
Old Testament. No one in all the centuries
gone by had found it there ; nor could it have
been taken thence, for the simple reason that
the Old Testament did not contain it. It
was only through their faith in the Crucified

Conclusion 197
One that his followers afterwards read it
into the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah.1 No,
Jesus was left to face the dark ways of God
and an enormous task alone. He had so to
ennoble and to transfigure suffering and
failure, the abominations of Judaism, that
they could become the crown of all that his
followers beheved of their Messiah. He had
to conquer a new world which was closed to
Israel, but within which Paul, the quondam
Jew, could exultingly cry a generation later,
" We rejoice in our sufferings " ; which Goethe
meant when he spoke of the sanctity of
sorrow revealed by Christianity. Jesus
accomplished the task partially by means of
the idea of the Son of Man. You cannot 1%
make an omelette without breaking eggs. * ^
Yet this idea of a swiftly approaching out
ward glory was not the factor which rendered
possible, but only facilitated, his bold act of
1 This chapter is, at any rate in its orignal sense, not
Messianic, however various the interpretations which it
now permits.

198 Jesus
faith. The foundation of his new thoughts
and convictions lay deeper, in the relations of
personal trust between himself and his Father.
Because Jesus accepted his destiny as coming
direct from the hand of God, because he went
the dark way in the spirit of the Psalmist —
" Nevertheless will I remain with thee, and
thou holdest me with thy right hand," —
therefore he rose above his fate, therefore
he could wed the thought of death with the
conviction that he was in a peculiar sense
God's envoy. Not in his utterances about
the Son of Man, but in Gethsemane do the
calm, deep grandeur and the sure foundation
of his life reveal themselves.
The same holds good of the whole Messianic
consciousness of Jesus ; it was the form in
which an eternal meaning clothed itself. We
have already shown why the title of Messiah
was necessary to Jesus in its general aspect,
apart from certain details : because it alone
coincided with his consciousness of his own
unique position and super-prophetic signi-

Conclusion 199
ficance. Let us contemplate for a moment
this sovereign sense of leadership by which
Jesus was possessed, and the inimitable sure-
ness with which it unfolded itself in every
direction. He knew how to value the
authorities of the past, but he placed himself
above them. He was of more account than
kings and prophets, than David, Solomon,
and the Temple.1 The tradition of the elders
he met with his "But I say unto you," and
even Moses was not an authority to whom he
gave unqualified submission. As with the
past, so too the present bowed before him.
John the Baptist he thought the greatest
among the sons of men, yet it was not Jesus
who put the question, "Art thou he that
cometh ? " to John, but John to Jesus, and he
answered the inquiry with a veiled though yet
distinct affirmative. In a time of confusion
and perplexity and of the appearance of many
false Messiahs, his own confidence reared itself
proudly and boldly : " None knoweth the Son,
1 Luke x. 23 f. ; Matt. xii. 6, 41 f.; Mark ii. 25 f.

200 Jesus
save the Father ; neither doth any know the
Father, save the Son."1 He possessed the
simple greatness that won the hearts of the
simple men and women of the people.2 Wher
ever he showed himself his person inspired un
limited trust and lofty enthusiasm, and a faith
which made the impossible easy and lifted him
and his surroundings into an unfamiliar
wonder-world. In controversy he was a rock
of strength. His hottest and noblest wrath
was united with the serenest calm. He was
invulnerable in dispute and ever victorious.
Whom he attacked he branded for all eternity ;
what he respected he made eternally precious.
He turned the word Pharisee into a term of
reproach, and exalted the despised Samaritan.
The outcast and rejected he raised with
his wonderful power and set them on firm
ground. He could venture into a world full
of dirt and evil repute because he himself
was strong and pure and free. He riveted
his disciples to himself as no one before or
1 Matt. xi. 27. 2 Luke xi. 27 f. ; xiv. 15 f. ; xix. 1 f.

Conclusion 20 1
since has ever riveted his followers. He set
them the alternative of all or nothing, and
they obeyed : " Master, we have left all for
thy sake." x He allowed no looking back, no
consideration even for the strongest claims of
piety. He had higher tasks to set them. He
could dare to say, " If any man cometh unto
me, and hateth not his own father and mother
and wife and children and brethren and sisters,
yea, and his own hfe also, he cannot be my
disciple."2 In the days of failure and dark
foreboding he tightened the bonds between
himself and his disciples still more closely.
He demanded of them a never-ceasing faith
fulness down to death itself, and a steadfast
affirmation of his cause and his person.
" Everyone who shall confess me before men,
him will I also confess before my Father
which is in heaven."3 Such words either
come from thoughtless presumption or from
the very highest strength and confidence.
History has decided for the latter.
1 Mark x. 28. 2 Luke xiv. 26. 3 Matt. x. 32.

202 Jesus
Yet with all this — and here we touch the
culminating point — he never overstepped the
limits of the purely human. The almighty
God remained before his eyes a sublime and
lofty presence ; he did not presume to place
himself at His side. When he riveted his
disciples' souls to his own, he did so because
he wished to lead them on and beyond to the
living God. He wished to be the way to the
heavenly Father, not the goal itself. He drew
a sharp dividing line between God and him
self. "None is good save one, even God,"
he said, so placing himself on the side of
struggling humanity.1 He came to the baptism
of repentance and forgiveness of sins as given
by the Baptist. To the woman out of the
multitude who pressed her impetuous homage
upon him, he answered : " Yea, rather, blessed
are they that hear the word of God, and keep
it."2 "Whosoever shall do the will of God,"
he cried, "the same is my brother and sister
and mother."3 He never demanded faith in
1 Mark x. 18. 2 Luke xi. 28. 3 Mark iii. 35.

Conclusion 203
himself as he demanded faith in God. In all
his parables — the most genuine part of his
sayings that we possess — he places man in
direct relation with the living God, while he
himself retires completely into the background.
Nevertheless, in appropriating the idea of
the Son of Man, he seems almost to overstep
the boundary. Yet he did not thereby place
himself on a level with God. Above all he
did not lay claim to the Judgeship of the
world, although that conception was, strictly
speaking, included in that of the Son of Man.
It is true that in the narratives of our Gospels
the opposite seems to be the case. But it is
inconceivable that Jesus, who stamped the
fear of that almighty God who had power to
damn body and soul together upon the hearts
of his disciples with such marvellous energy,1
and who could speak of that fear because he
shared it to the bottom of his soul, should
now have arrogated to himself the Judgeship
of the world in the place of God. This is
1 See above, pp. 110 f.

204 Jesus
an instance of the faith of the community
working upon the tradition. The progressive
development of a single saying which is re
ported in five passages of our Gospels may
serve to make this clear. Matthew alone gives
the primitive version : " Everyone who shall
confess me before men, him will I also confess
before my Father which is in heaven. But
whosoever shall deny me before men, him will
I also deny before my Father which is in
heaven."1 Mark already modifies the saying
thus : " Whosoever shall be ashamed of me
and of my words . . . the Son of man2 also
shall be ashamed of him, when he cometh in
the glory of his Father with the holy angels."3
And finally, in the passage corresponding to
Mark's, Matthew 4 has the still more compre
hensive utterance : " For the Son of man shall
1 Matt, x. 32.
2 Observe here also the encroachment of the title ' ' Son
of Man."
3 Mark viii. 38.
4 The first-quoted saying of Matthew belongs to the
so-called Logia document.

Conclusion 205
come in the glory of his Father with his
angels ; and then shall he render unto every
man according to his deeds."1 Thus as the
tradition was handed down by his community,
Jesus was gradually removed from the position
of a simple witness for his followers before
God's tribunal to that of the actual Judge of
the world. Supported by this piece of evidence,
we shall be justified in holding all those
passages in which Jesus appears as the Judge
of mankind to be the dogmatism of the
Christian community and not the opinion of
Jesus himself.
Finally, this most human picture is crowned
by suffering and death. We have already seen
how Jesus rose above his fate by his infinite
trust in a heavenly Father, and how he fused
the idea of suffering into his Messianic con
sciousness. But here the question arises,
whether he also assigned any special purpose
and significance to his death. We can no
1 Matt. xvi. 27, and besides the above-quoted passages,
the same saying occurs in Luke viii. 25 and xii. 8 f.

206 Jesus
longer decide this question with any certainty.
Practically only two passages in our Gospel
tradition need be considered with regard to
it : first, the saying that the Son of Man came
to give his life a ransom for many,1 and
secondly, the institution of the Last Supper.
In the present state of our knowledge, how
ever, we shall unfortunately be obliged to give
up all hope of ascertaining the original meaning
of the Last Supper. In any case, a justifiable
and widespread doubt has again been raised in
recent times as to whether that solemn action
of Jesus at his last meal with the disciples had
anything directly to do with the thought of
his death. Only one thing is probably certain,
that at the original Supper Jesus did not mean
to institute a sacrament in the Cathohc,
Lutheran, or Calvinistic sense. The Last
Supper may therefore be left out of account
for our present purpose, and thus only a single
saying (Mark x. 45) remains to be considered.
But in view of the nature of our tradition it
1 Mark x. 45.

Conclusion 207
is impossible to construct anything upon an
isolated saying of this sort. It is also improb
able on general grounds that Jesus should have
asked himself the purpose of his suffering
and death at all, if, as we believe, his thoughts
about his future destiny remained doubtful
and perplexed until the hour of Gethsemane.
It is certainly possible that he interpreted his
death dimly and prophetically as a ransom for
many. As the Jewish tradition made the
martyr-brothers of the Maccabean rising re
peatedly express in their prayers the thought
that their unmerited suffering must appease
the wrath of God against his people, so Jesus
may also have caught at this idea and have
expressed the hope that through his suffering
the wrath of God against the multitude (of
Israel) might be appeased. And indeed a deep
and eternal truth lies hidden in this faith in
the vicarious suffering of the righteous and the
infinite value of martyrdom. But we can no
longer see clearly in this matter. One thing
only is certain, that Jesus never conceived or

208 Jesus
expressed the thought that God's forgiveness
of sins depended absolutely upon his own
sacrificial death or upon the vicarious atone
ment rendered by his death. The parable of
the Prodigal Son and the unqualified certainty
with which he constantly proclaimed the
omnipresent, merciful, and sin-forgiving God
emphatically protest against such a view.
The Christian Church, in brooding over the
death of her Lord, has continued throughout
the centuries to seek some special purpose in
it, lying outside the mere bodily death of
Jesus. In her, that is to say in Paul, whose
spirit gave the direction to centuries of de
velopment, the Jewish feeling that suffering
and defeat were shameful, ignominious, and
abhorrent, a problem which demanded special
explanation, continued to operate in this one
particular. I believe that we shall be nearer to
the spirit of Jesus if we wholly abandon these
specialised views of his death. For us his
suffering, crucifixion, and death are the crown
and consummation of his life. We cannot

Conclusion 209
conceive any ending to the life of Jesus grander,
more powerful, or even other than it actually
was. The cross and the crown of thorns do
but complete his figure, and lift it far above
those of the other founders of religions.
Only by walking the appointed path of
sorrow in silence and simplicity, without
pretension and without faltering, in undimin
ished trust in his heavenly Father, in the
unbroken conviction of his own divine
mission, did he render his highest service.
Only so did he reveal the new moral world,
ennoble suffering and defeat, and create the
"worship of sorrow" and the faith in the
eternal value of martyrdom. Only here did
he reach his consummation as leader of the
ages and nations to God.
Leader of the ages and nations to God, —
for death and the grave could not hold his
person and his spirit. The days of the
Passion were followed by Easter in the
disciples' hearts, and with the tidings that
their Lord had risen again and was alive

210 Jesus
they founded the first Christian community.
What the disciples actually experienced in
those Easter days belongs not to an account
of Jesus' hfe and personality, but to the history
of the primitive Church. One thing, how
ever, must be said in conclusion of this brief
sketch, in order that we may judge the life of
Jesus by the proper standard. The manner
in which they experienced these impressions
belongs to the outward and passing form.
But the inmost substance of their Easter
visions was that the figure of their Lord
and Master appeared again before their
mental eyes, clad in all the strength and
splendour in which they had known it upon
earth, yet now transfigured and freed from
the chances and changes of our mortal hfe.
It was that figure itself, and no experience
of an outward nature, that compelled their
souls, when they declared that their Lord
lived again and would be with them alway,
even unto the end of the world.
To this the history of man has said Yea

Conclusion 211
and Amen. And in spite of the separa
tion of time and the frequently exasperating
uncertainty of the tradition, we who occupy
our place in the history of Jesus through the
centuries can still feel his presence near us,
with his trust in God and his nearness to
God, his relentless moral earnestness, his
conquest of pain, his certainty of the
forgiveness "of sins, and his eternal hope.
And when we absorb ourselves in the
contemplation of that figure we feel a great
uprising of the spirit. For there we touch
indeed upon the foundations of our own
spiritual and personal existence.

PBINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBUROH.