That in this modem construction we liave the precise contradictory of the conception of Jesus and of the course of His life on earth given us by the Evangelists, it needs no argument to establish. In the Gospel presentation, foresight is made the principle of our Lord's career. In the modem view He is credited with no foresight whatever. At best. He was possessed by a fixed conviction of His Messianic mission, wliether gained in ecstatic vision (as, e.g., O. Holtzmann) or acquired in deep religious experiences (as, e.g., SchwartzkopfD ; and He felt an assurance, based on this ineradicable conviction, that in His own good time and way God would work that mission out for Him ; and in this assurance He went faithfully onward fiilfilling His daily task, bungling meanwliile egregiously in His reading of tlie scroll of de.stiny which was unrolling for Him. It is an intensely, even an exaggeratedly, human Christ which is here offered us: an<l He stands, therefore, in the strongest contrast with the frankly Divine Christ which tlie
Gospels present to us. On wl be expected to substitute this i not on grounds of historical i historical record of the self-i
\V.
ertainly ) liave no of Jesus
except that embodied in the Gospel dramatization of His life and the Gospel report of His teaching ; and that record expressly contradicts at every step this modern reconstruction of its contents and development. The very principle of the modern construction is reversal of the Gospel delineation. Its peculiarity is that, though it calls itself the ' historical ' view, it has behind it no single scrap of historical testimony ; the entirety of historicju evidence contradicts it flatly. Are we to accept it, then, on the general grounds of inherent pro- bability and rational construction ? It is historic- ally impossible that the great religious movement which we call Christianity could have taken its origin and derived its inspiration — an inspiration far from spent after two thousand years— from such a figure as this Jesus. The plain fact is that in these modem reconstructions we have nothing but a sustained attempt to construct a naturalistic Jesus ; and their chief interest is that thej^ bring before us with unwonted clearness the kind of being the man must have been who at that time and in those circumstances could have come for- ward making the claims which Jesus made without supernatural nature, endowment, or aid to sustain Him. The value of the speculation is that it makes superabundantly clear that no such bein" could have occupied the place which the historical Jesus occupied ; could have made the impression on His followers which the historical Jesus made ; could have become the source of the stream of re- ligious influence which we call Christianity, as the historical Jesus became. The clear foraiulation of the naturalistic hypothesis, in the construction of a naturalistic Jesus, in other words, throws us violently back upon the Divine Jesus of the Evan- gelists as the only Jesus that is historically jios- sible. From this point of view, the labours of the scholars who have with infinite pains built up this construction of Jesus' life and development have not been in vain.
What, then, is to be said of the predictions of Jesus, and especially of the three great series of prophecies of His death, resurrection, and return, with, respect to their contents and fulfilment ? This is not the place to discuss the eschatology of Jesus. But a few general remarks seem not un- called for. The topic has received of late mnch renewed attention with very varied results, the number and varietj; of constructions proposed having been greatly increased above what the in- herent difficnUy of the subject will account for, by the freedom with which the Scripture data have been modified or set aside on so-called critical grounds by the several investigators. Nevertheless, most of the new interpretations also may be classi- fied under the old categories of futuristic, preter- istic, and spiritualistic.
The spiritualistic Intorpretation— whose method of dealinfc with our Lord's predictions readily falls in with a widespread theory that it is ' contrarj- to the spirit and manner of crenuine prophecy to predict actual circumstanc-is lik. n snothsaicr' (Muirhead, Eschatology of Jet^nx. ] ! - i' , /
phecire of Jems Christ, 78. 250. J i
a new impulse through its attr Haupt {EschaMnq. Amm^fn Jr.
olog)-, sa>-3Ha\iiit, is infinitely s: 1 1 '.■■'■ -
istobeacrnn;;. I I .nr rum-
jrreat moral r. j always, while n I act'Cp. lr,7). AronM
revival (Schleiermacli.
kunftsgedanke Jem,
1!K)1) of the identific;
' since its refutation by
FORESIGHT
FOEGIVENESS
615
Christ, 189ft), whose that by His resun-f.
Jesus spoke ot Hi
exact contradictory, viz. nt just His return. The r Jesus the hope of resur- , together,' so that * when :is thinking of His return, rttiig Ekstattker? 67, note), is very widely huM. ili. ^nl -i-lkiry hypothesis (first suggested by Colani) of the in<-lusiun in thu yreat eschatological discourse attributed by the Evangehsts to our Lord of a 'little Apoca- lypse ' of Jewish or Jewish Christian origin, by which Weiflfen- bach eased his task, has in more or less modified form received the widest acceptance (cf. H. Holtzmann, N7' Thcol. i. 327, note), but rests on no solid grounds (cf. Weiss, Beyschlag, Haupt, Clemen). Most adherents of the modern school are clear that Jesus expected and asserted that He would return in Messianic glory for the consamniatinn of the Kingdom ; and