What must absorb our attention immediately, how- ever, is the difficulty that is found even on these natu- ralistic presuppositions in eliminating from the portrait of Jesus drawn in the Gospels all supernatural traits and all claims on His own part to a supernatural per- sonality. To be successful here, there is required such a policy of thoroughgoing rejection as Kalthoff's and W. B. Smith's, who sweep away the whole figure of Jesus itself as a myth, or at least as Wrede's, who would have us believe that Jesus made no claim to even Messianic dignity, so that the entire picture drawn of His career in our Gospels is false ; or else such a policy of " ignoramus '^ as Pfleiderer's who declines to form any picture of the real Jesus at all. The majority of naturalistic critics recoil, however, from these extremes with an energy which seems to betray at least a semi- consciousness that there may haply be found In them the reductio ad absurdum of their whole method. Their position is certainly a hard one between these extremes from which they recoil and the portrait of the evangel- ists toward which their recoil brings them back. In en- deavoring to avoid conclusions recognized by them as In- tolerable they are compelled to give recognition to facts as to the claims of the real Jesus which are fatal to their whole elaborately argued position.
They are forced, for example, to allow that Jesus did announce Himself as the Messiah.^* And they are
i*Bousset, Jesus, 168, argues: "We have certain knowledge that the belief existed from the very beginning among the Christian commu-
1 66 The Designations of Our Lord
forced to admit that, In developing His Messianic conception, He was wont to call Himself ' the Jesus Certainly ^on^ of Man.' ^' It makes very enter- Claimed to be talning reading to observe Bousset, Messiah and for example, grudgingly conceding the on o an £^^^^ ^^^ ^j^^^ nervously endeavoring to save himself from the consequences of the damaging acknowledgment. He cannot deny that this title " represents a perfectly definite concep- tion of the Messiah," a conception which sees in the IMessiah a supernatural figure who comes down from heaven for a mission, and who is clothed with no less a function than that of the Judge of the world: and he cannot deny that Jesus represents Himself as
nity that Jesus was the Messiah, and, arguing backwards, we can assert that the rise of such a belief would be absolutely inexplicable if Jesus had not declared to His disciples in His life-time that He was Messiah." It is consequently " now definitely assured, in spite of con- tinual discussions in which it is still frequently disputed," " that Jesus considered Himself to be the Messiah of His people" (107). Cf. Volk- mar Fritzsche, Das Berufsbezousstsein Jesu, 13, and Schwartzkopff there quoted. For a precis of the literature in which it is altogether denied that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, see Holtzmann A'^. T. Theologie, I. 280, note. Of course it is not disputable that it was a " self-evident assumption " on the part of the Synoptists that He was the Messiah (Bousset, 167) : for the later community — the community which gave birth to the evangelical narratives — says Bousset (171)1 " the Messiahship of Jesus was the surest, most self-evident, and most precious thing about Him." Cf. Dalman, Words, 306.
1^ Professor N. Schmidt may be taken as the type of those extremists who find it more convenient just to deny that Jesus used this title of Himself at all: "Jesus never used this title concerning Himself either to claim Messiahship in any sense, or to hint that He was ' a mere man ' or * the true man ' ; but in some pregnant utterances used it in reference to man in general, his duties, rights and privileges" {The Prophet of Nazareth, p. vii.). Mt 8-'' according to him means that the life of man is " full of danger and uncertainty," whereas a beast is "not deprived of his home and hearth by his convictions" (p. m) !
^The Synoptic Jesus Primitive 167