In like manner the significance of St. Paul's testimony to the facts and teaching of the Gospels, as also the significance of his claim to work mir- acles in the power which Christ bestowed, is minimized, if not disregarded.
We thus owe this wonderful picture of a great personality mainly, if not entirely, to documents bearing the names of three writers of whom we are assured that we know very little, and whose claims to be the authors of the Ijooks (in their present shape at all events) which bear their names must be very largely and seriously dis- counted. And yet tliese obscure writers have given us the picture of a life and of a teaching the beauty and the excellence of which mankind has never ceased to acknowledge.
* Here,' saj's a learned and cultured Jew, after allowing that the Synoptic Gospels do contain teaching which in comparison with average Judaism is both valuable and original, both new and true, ' we have religion and morality joined together at a white heat of intensity. The teaching often glows with light and fire. . . . The luminous juxtaposition of even familiar OT doctrines may be novel and stimulating. The combination of
ligious of the
ts out that there are one or two facts weaken the effect of the best Rabbinic
of 'the first-clai
buried in a mass of greatly inferior matter, so that they are difficult to unearth. They are not collected together in a lovely setting, united and illumined by the story of a noble life.' He " * " ction of the great Midrash, it must be admitted that the same 'powerful, driving, and emotional effect as the sayings and teachings of the Gospels ' is not pro- duced, t
12. But we note that tliis picture is in many respects entirely ojiposed to current Jewish concep- tions of the day. ^lo one has emphasized this more strongly than Bousset in relation to the Jewish anticipations and expectations of the Kingdom of God. He insists, indeed, upon the Messianic con- sciousness of Jesus, without which he regards not only the whole work of Jesus, but the conduct of His disciples after His death, as unintelligible. But if Jesus regarded Himself as the Messiah, it is evident, continues Bousset, that He did so in a manner totally opposed to the predominant and current Jewish expectations. Spiritual concep- tions of the Messiah were not altogether wanting, but political hopes always occupied the central place in the picture. In the sense of such hopes Jesus was not the Messiah, and would never have become so. He expected the sovereignty of God and not that of Israel, the victory of good and the judgment of evil, not the triump^i of the Jew and the annihilation of the Roman ; He preached a kingdom in which the vision of God was granted to the pure, and as the prep.arer for and the ruler in that kingdom He regarded Himself. § But the Synoptists no less than St. John furnish us with another picture which was even more decisively
* 8ee, e.g., the remarks of Loisy, AuUmr d'v.n petit Here, 1903, p. 97 B. ; and, on the other h^nd, Loisv's fellow-countr^Tnan and religionist Th. Calmes, L'Emngile s'elnn Saint Jean,' 1906, pp. 68, 75.
t C. G. Montefiore, ' The Synoptic Gospels and the Jewish Consciousness,' in the Hibbert Journal, July 1905, p. 658.
t lb. p. 652.
5 See Bousset's remarks in his Was wissen wir iion Jesus ! p. 01.
opposed to the current conceptions of the Jewish nation, the picture of a suftering Messiah. It is not too much to say that 'the idea of the Messianic suflerings and death is one that wakes no echo in the heart of any Jewish contemporary of our Lord, not excepting even His disciples.'* In short, the words of Dalman are amply justified, ' Suffering and death for the actual possessor of the Messianic dignity are in fact unimaginable according to the testimony of the Gospels ' ( Words of Jesus, p. 265, Eng. tr.).
Nothing could mark more strongly the contrast fish Messianic notions and the picture of the M<
Jewish
betw
picture of the Messiah as realized in our Gospels, than the following passage from the Jewish Encyclopedia: "Jesus' word on the cross. " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " was in all its implications itself a disproof of the exaggerated claims made for Him after His death by His disciples. The very form of Hia punishment would disprove those claims in Jewish eyes. No Messiah that Jews could recognise could suffer such a death." ' t
This representation of a suffering Messiah whidi the Gospels presented so uncompromisingly, pressed hard for a solution upon the famous founder of the Tubingen School :
' Never was that which bore the outward appearance of ruin and annihilation turned into such signal and decisive victory, and so glorious a passage into life, as in the death of Jesus. Up to this time there was always a possibility that He and the people might come to agree on the ground of the Messianic faith . . . but His death made a complete and irreparable
breach between Him and Judais impossible for the Jew, as long lieve in Him as the Messiah. To after His dying such a death conception