vii. 13, from the mystical apocalyptic literature, meaning thereby to

indicate that He was the Man of God in contrast to the Man of Sin.(205)

Holtzmann felt a kind of relief in handing over to the philologists the obstinate problem which since the time of Baldensperger and Weiss had caused so much trouble to theologians, and wanted to postpone the historical discussion until the Aramaic experts had settled the linguistic question. That happened sooner than was expected. In 1898 Dalman declared in his epoch‐making work (_Die Worte Jesu_) that he could not admit the linguistic objections to the use of the expression Son of Man by Jesus. “Biblical Aramaic,” he says, “does not differ in this respect from Hebrew. The simple אנש and not בן אנש is the term for man.”... It was only later that the Jewish‐Galilaean dialect, like the Palestinian‐Christian dialect, used בן אנש for man, though in both idioms the simple אנש occurs in the sense of “some one.” “In view of the whole facts of the case,” he continues, “what has to be said is that Jewish‐Palestinian Aramaic of the earlier period used אנש for ‘man,’ and occasionally to designate a plurality of men makes use of the expression בני אנשא. The singular בן אנש was not current, and was only used in imitation of the Hebrew text of the Bible, where בן אדם belongs to the poetic diction, and is, moreover, not of very frequent occurrence.” “It is,” he says elsewhere, “by no means a sign of a sound historical method, instead of working patiently at the solution of the problem, to hasten like Oort and Lietzmann to the conclusion that the absence of the expression in the New Testament Epistles is a proof that Jesus did not use it either, but that there was somewhere or other a Hellenistic community in the Early Church which had a predilection for this name, and often made Jesus speak of Himself in the Gospel narrative in the third person, in order to find an opportunity of bringing it in.”

So the oxen turned back with the ark into the land of the Philistines. It was a case of returning to the starting‐point and deciding on historical grounds in what sense Jesus had used the expression.(206) But the possibilities were reduced by the way in which Lietzmann had posed the problem, since the interpretations according to which Jesus had used it in a veiled ethical Messianic sense, to indicate the ethical and spiritual transformation of all the eschatological conceptions, were now manifestly incapable of offering any convincing argument against the radical denial of the use of the expression. Baldensperger rightly remarked in a review of the whole discussion that the question which was ultimately at stake in the combat over the title Son of Man was the question whether Jesus was the Messiah or no, and that Dalman, by his proof of its linguistic possibility, had saved the Messiahship of Jesus.(207)

But what kind of Messiahship? Is it any other kind than the future Messiahship of the apocalyptic Son of Man which Johannes Weiss had asserted? Did Jesus mean anything different by the Son of Man from that which was meant by the apocalyptic writers? To put it otherwise: behind the Son‐of‐Man problem there lies the general question whether Jesus can have described Himself as a present Messiah; for the fundamental difficulty is that He, a man upon earth, should give Himself out to be the Son of Man, and at the same time apparently give to that title a quite different sense from that which it previously possessed.

The champion of the linguistic possibility of this self‐designation made the last serious attempt to render the transformation of the conception historically conceivable. He argues that Jesus cannot have used it as a mere meaningless expression, a periphrasis for the simple I.(208) On the other hand, the term cannot have been understood by the disciples as an exalted title, or at least only in the sense that the title indicative of exaltation is paradoxically connected with the title indicative of humility. “We shall be justified in saying, that, for the Synoptic Evangelists, ‘Man’s Son’ was no title of honour for the Messiah, but—as it must necessarily appear to a Hellenist—a veiling of His Messiahship under a name which emphasises the humanity of its bearer.” For them it was not the references to the sufferings of “Man’s Son” that were paradoxical, but the references to His exaltation: that “Man’s Son” should be put to death is not wonderful; what is wonderful is His “coming again upon the clouds of heaven.”

If Jesus called Himself the Son of Man, the only conclusion which could be drawn by those that heard Him was, “that for some reason or other He desired to describe Himself as a Man _par excellence_.” There is no reason to think of the Heavenly Son of Man of the Similitudes of Enoch and Fourth Ezra; that conception could hardly be present to the minds of His auditors.

“How was one who was now walking upon earth, to come from heaven? He would have needed first to be translated thither. One who had died or been rapt away from earth might be brought back to earth again in this way, or a being who had never before been upon earth, might be conceived as descending thither.”

But if, on the one hand, the title Son of Man was not to be understood apart from the reference to the passage in Daniel, while on the other Jesus so designated Himself as a man actually present upon earth, “what was really implied was that He was the man in whom Daniel’s vision of ‘one like unto a Son of Man’ was being fulfilled.” He could not certainly expect from His hearers a complete understanding of the self‐designation. “We are doubtless justified in saying that in using it, He intentionally offered them an enigma which challenged further reflection upon His Person.”

According to Peter’s confession the name was intelligible to the disciples as coming from Dan. vii. 13, and obviously indicating Him who was destined to the sovereignty of the world. Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man, “not as meaning the lowly one, but as a scion of the human race with its human weakness, whom nevertheless God will make Lord of the world; and it is very probable that Jesus found the Son of Man of Dan. vii. in Ps. viii. 5 ff. also.” Sayings regarding humiliation and suffering could be attached to the title just as well as references to exaltation. For since the “Child of Man” has placed Himself upon the throne of God, He is in reality no longer a mere man, but ruler over heaven and earth, “the Lord.”

This attempt of Dalman’s has the same significance in regard to the question of the Messiahship as Bousset’s had for the ethical question. Just as in Bousset’s view the Kingdom of God was, in a paradoxical way, after all proclaimed as present, so here the self‐designation “Son of Man” is retained by a paradox as conveying the sense of a present Messiahship. But the documents do not give any support to this assumption; on the contrary they contradict it at every point. According to Dalman it was not the predictions of the passion of the Son of Man which sounded paradoxical to the disciples, but the predictions of His exaltation. But we are distinctly told that when He spoke of His passion they did not understand the saying. The predictions of His exaltation, however, they understood so well that without troubling themselves further about the predictions of the sufferings, they began to dispute who should be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, and who should have his throne closest to the Son of Man. And if it is once admitted that Jesus took the designation from Daniel, what ground is there for asserting that the purely eschatological transcendental significance which the term had taken on in the Similitudes of Enoch and retains in Fourth Ezra had no existence for Jesus? Thus, by a long round‐about, criticism has come back to Johannes Weiss.(209) His eschatological solution of the Son‐of‐Man question—the elements of which are to be found in Strauss’s first Life of Jesus—is the only possible one. Dalman expresses the same idea in the form of a question. “How could one who was actually walking the earth come down from heaven? He would have needed first to be translated thither. One who had died or been rapt away from earth might possibly be brought back to earth in this way.” Having reached this point we have only to observe further that Jesus, from the “confession of Peter” onwards, always speaks of the Son of Man in connexion with death and resurrection. That is to say, that once the disciples know in what relation He stands to the Son of Man, He uses this title to suggest the manner of His return: as the sequel to His death and resurrection He will return to the world again as a superhuman Personality. Thus the purely transcendental use of the term suggested by Dalman as a possibility turns out to be the historical reality.

Broadly speaking, therefore, the Son‐of‐Man problem is both historically solvable and has been solved. The authentic passages are those in which the expression is used in that apocalyptic sense which goes back to Daniel. But we have to distinguish two different uses of the term according to the degree of knowledge assumed in the hearers. If the secret of Jesus is unknown to them, then in that case they understand simply that Jesus is speaking of the “Son of Man” and His coming without having any suspicion that He and the Son of Man have any connexion. It would be thus, for instance, when in sending out the disciples in Matt. x. 23, He announced the imminence of the appearing of the Son of Man; or when He pictured the judgment which the Son of Man would hold (Matt. xxv. 31‐46), if we may imagine it to have been spoken to the people at Jerusalem. Or, on the other hand, the secret is known to the hearers. In that case they understand that the term Son of Man points to the position to which He Himself is to be exalted when the present era passes into the age to come. It was thus, no doubt, in the case of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi, and of the High Priest to whom Jesus, after answering his demand with the simple “Yea” (Mark xiv. 62), goes on immediately to speak of the exaltation of the Son of Man to the right hand of God, and of His coming upon the clouds of heaven.

Jesus did not, therefore, veil His Messiahship by using the expression Son of Man, much less did He transform it, but He used the expression to refer, in the only possible way, to His Messianic office as destined to be realised at His “coming,” and did so in such a manner that only the initiated understood that He was speaking of His own coming, while others understood Him as referring to the coming of a Son of Man who was other than Himself.

The passages where the title has not this apocalyptic reference, or where, previous to the incident at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus in speaking to the disciples equates the Son of Man with His own “ego,” are to be explained as of literary origin. This set of secondary occurrences of the title has nothing to do with “Early Church theology”; it is merely a question of phenomena of translation and tradition. In the saying about the Sabbath in Mark ii. 28, and perhaps also in the saying about the right to forgive sins in Mark ii. 10, Son of Man doubtless stood in the original in the general sense of “man,” but was later, certainly by our Evangelists, understood as referring to Jesus as the Son of Man. In other passages tradition, following the analogy of those passages in which the title is authentic, put in place of the simple I—expressed in the Aramaic by “the man”—the self‐designation “Son of Man,” as we can clearly show by comparing Matt. xvi. 13, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” with Mark viii. 27, “Who do men say that I am?”

Three passages call for special discussion. In the statement that a man may be forgiven for blasphemy against the Son of Man, but not for blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in Matt. xii. 32, the “Son of Man” may be authentic. But of course it would not, even in that case, give any hint that “Son of Man designates the Messiah in His humiliation” as Dalman wished to infer from the passage, but would mean that Jesus was speaking of the Son of Man, here as elsewhere, in the third person without reference to Himself, and was thinking of a contemptuous denial of the Parousia such as might have been uttered by a Sadducee. But if we take into account the parallel in Mark iii. 28 and 29, where blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is spoken of without any mention of blasphemy against the Son of Man, it seems more natural to take the mention of the Son of Man as a secondary interpolation, derived from the same line of tradition, perhaps from the same hand, as the “Son of Man” in the question to the disciples at Caesarea Philippi.

The two other sayings, the one about the Son of Man “who hath not where to lay His head,” Matt. viii. 20, and that about the Son of Man who must submit to the reproach of being a glutton and a wine‐bibber, Matt. xi. 19, belong together. If we assume it to be possible, in conformity with the saying about the purpose of the parables in Mark iv. 11 and 12, that Jesus sometimes spoke words which He did not intend to be understood, we may—if we are unwilling to accept the supposition of a later periphrasis for the ego, which would certainly be the most natural explanation—recognise in these sayings two obscure declarations regarding the Son of Man. They would then be supposed to have meant in the original form, which is no longer clearly recognisable, that the Son of Man would in some way justify the conduct of Jesus of Nazareth. But the way in which this idea is expressed was not such as to make it easy for His hearers to identify Him with the Son of Man. Moreover, it was for them a conception impossible to realise, since Jesus was a natural, and the Son of Man a supernatural, being; and the eschatological scheme of things had not provided for a man who at the end of the existing era should hint to others that at the great transformation of all things He would be manifested as the Son of Man. This case presented itself only in the course of history, and it created a preparatory stage of eschatology which does not answer to any traditional scheme.

That act of the self‐consciousness of Jesus by which He recognised Himself in His earthly existence as the future Messiah is the act in which eschatology supremely affirms itself. At the same time, since it brings, spiritually, that which is to come, into the unaltered present, into the existing era, it is the end of eschatology. For it is its “spiritualisation,” a spiritualisation of which the ultimate consequence was to be that all its “supersensuous” elements were to be realised only spiritually in the present earthly conditions, and all that is affirmed as supersensuous in the transcendental sense was to be regarded as only the ruined remains of an eschatological world‐view. The Messianic secret of Jesus is the basis of Christianity, since it involves the de‐nationalising and the spiritualisation of Jewish eschatology.

Yet more. It is the primal fact, the starting‐point, of a process which manifests itself, indeed, in Christianity, but cannot fully work itself out even here, of a movement in the direction of inwardness which brings all religious magnitudes into the one indivisible spiritual present, and which Christian dogmatic has not ventured to carry to its completion. The Messianic consciousness of the uniquely great Man of Nazareth sets up a struggle between the present and the beyond, and introduces that resolute absorption of the beyond by the present, which in looking back we recognise as the history of Christianity, and of which we are conscious in ourselves as the essence of religious progress and experience—a process of which the end is not yet in sight.

In this sense Jesus did “accept the world” and did stand in conflict with Judaism. Protestantism was a step—a step on which hung weighty consequences—in the progress of that “acceptance of the world” which was constantly developing itself from within. By a mighty revolution which was in harmony with the spirit of that great primal act of the consciousness of Jesus, though in opposition to some of the most certain of His sayings, ethics became world‐accepting. But it will be a mightier revolution still when the last remaining ruins of the supersensuous other‐worldly system of thought are swept away in order to clear the site for a new spiritual, purely real and present world. All the inconsistent compromises and constructions of modern theology are merely an attempt to stave off the final expulsion of eschatology from religion, an inevitable but a hopeless attempt. That proleptic Messianic consciousness of Jesus, which was in reality the only possible actualisation of the Messianic idea, carries these consequences with it inexorably and unfailingly. At that last cry upon the cross the whole eschatological supersensuous world fell in upon itself in ruins, and there remained as a spiritual reality only that present spiritual world, bound as it is to sense, which Jesus by His all‐ powerful word had called into being within the world which He contemned. That last cry, with its despairing abandonment of the eschatological future, is His real acceptance of the world. The “Son of Man” was buried in the ruins of the falling eschatological world; there remained alive only Jesus “the Man.” Thus these two Aramaic synonyms include in themselves, as in a symbol of reality, all that was to come.

If theology has found it so hard a task to arrive at an historical comprehension of the secret of this self‐designation, this is due to the fact that the question is not a purely historical one. In this word there lies the transformation of a whole system of thought, the inexorable consequence of the elimination of eschatology from religion. It was only in this future form, not as actual, that Jesus spoke of His Messiahship. Modern theology keeps on endeavouring to discover in the title of Son of Man, which is bound up with the future, a humanised present Messiahship. It does so in the conviction that the recognition of a purely future reference in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus would lead in the last result to a modification of the historic basis of our faith, which has itself become historical, and therefore true and self‐justifying. The recognition of the claims of eschatology signifies for our dogmatic a burning of the boats by which it felt itself able to return at any moment from the time of Jesus direct to the present.

One point that is worthy of notice in this connexion is the trustworthiness of the tradition. The Evangelists, writing in Greek, and the Greek‐speaking Early Church, can hardly have retained an understanding of the purely eschatological character of that self‐designation of Jesus. It had become for them merely an indirect method of self‐designation. And nevertheless the Evangelists, especially Mark, record the sayings of Jesus in such a way that the original significance and application of the designation in His mouth is still clearly recognisable, and we are able to determine with certainty the isolated cases in which this self‐designation in His discourses is of a secondary origin.

Thus the use of the term Son of Man—which, if we admitted the sweeping proposal of Lietzmann and Wellhausen to cancel it everywhere as an interpolation of Greek Early Church theology, would throw doubt on the whole of the Gospel tradition—becomes a proof of the certainty and trustworthiness of that tradition. We may, in fact, say that the progressive recognition of the eschatological character of the teaching and action of Jesus carries with it a progressive justification of the Gospel tradition. A series of passages and discourses which had been endangered because from the modern theological point of view which had been made the criterion of the tradition they appeared to be without meaning, are now secured. The stone which the critics rejected has become the corner‐stone of the tradition.

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If Aramaic scholarship appears in regard to the Son‐of‐Man question among the opponents of the thorough‐going eschatological view, it takes no other position in connexion with the retranslations and in the application of illustrative parallels from the Rabbinic literature.

In looking at the earlier works in this department, one is struck with the smallness of the result in proportion to the labour expended. The names that call for mention here are those of John Lightfoot, Christian Schöttgen, Joh. Gerh. Meuschen, J. Jak. Wettstein, F. Nork, Franz Delitzsch, Carl Siegfried, and A. Wünsche.(210) But even a work like F. Weber’s _System der altsynagogalen __ palästinensischen Theologie_,(211) which does not confine itself to single sayings and thoughts, but aims at exhibiting the Rabbinic system of thought as a whole, throws, in the main, but little light on the thoughts of Jesus. The Rabbinic parables supply, according to Jülicher, but little of value for the explanation of the parables of Jesus.(212) In this method of discourse, Jesus is so pre‐ eminently original, that any other productions of the Jewish parabolic literature are like stunted undergrowth beside a great tree; though that has not prevented His originality from being challenged in this very department, both in earlier times and at the present. As early as 1648, Robert Sheringham, of Cambridge,(213) suggested that the parables in Matt. xx. 1 ff., xxv. 1 ff., and Luke xvi., were derived from Talmudic sources, an opinion against which J. B. Carpzov, the younger, raised a protest; in 1839, F. Nork asserted, in his work on “Rabbinic Sources and Parallels for the New Testament Writings,” that the best thoughts in the discourses of Jesus are to be attributed to His Jewish teachers; in 1880 the Dutch Rabbi, T. Tal, maintained the thesis that the parables of the New Testament are all borrowed from the Talmud.(214) Theories of this kind cannot be refuted, because they lack the foundation necessary to any theory which is to be capable of being rationally discussed—that of plain common sense.(215)

We possess, however, really scientific attempts to define more closely the thoughts of Jesus by the aid of the Rabbinic language and Rabbinic ideas in the works of Arnold Meyer and Dalman. It cannot indeed be said that the obscure sayings which form the problem of present‐day exegesis are in all cases made clearer by them, much as we may admire the comprehensive knowledge of these scholars. Sometimes, indeed, they become more obscure than before. According to Meyer, for instance, the question of Jesus whether His disciples can drink of His cup, and be baptized with His baptism means, if put back into Aramaic, “Can you drink as bitter a drink as I; can you eat as sharply salted meat as I?”(216) Nor does Dalman’s Aramaic retranslation help us much with the saying about the violent who take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. According to him, it is not spoken of the faithful, but of the rulers of this world, and refers to the epoch of the Divine rule which has been introduced by the imprisonment of the Baptist. No one can violently possess himself of the Divine reign, and Jesus can therefore only mean that violence is done to it in the person of its subjects.

On this it must be remarked, that if the saying really means this, it is about as appropriate to its setting as a rock in the sky. Jesus is not speaking of the imprisonment of the Baptist. By the days of John the Baptist He means the time of his public ministry.

It is equally open to question whether in putting that crucial question regarding the Messiah in Mark xii. 37 He really intended to show, as Dalman thinks, “that physical descent from David was not of decisive importance—it did not belong to the essence of the Messiahship.”

But a point in regard to which Dalman’s remarks are of great value for the reconstruction of the life of Jesus is the entry into Jerusalem. Dalman thinks that the simple “Hosanna, blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord” (Mark xi. 9) was what the people really shouted in acclamation, and that the additional words in Mark and Matthew are simply an interpretative expansion. This acclamation did not itself contain any Messianic reference. This explains “why the entry into Jerusalem was not made a count in the charge urged against Him before Pilate.” The events of “Palm Sunday” only received their distinctively Messianic colour later. It was not the Messiah, but the prophet and wonder‐worker of Galilee whom the people hailed with rejoicing and accompanied with invocations of blessing.(217)

Generally speaking, the value of Dalman’s work lies less in the solutions which it offers than in the problems which it raises. By its very thorough discussions it challenges historical theology to test its most cherished assumptions regarding the teaching of Jesus, and make sure whether they are really so certain and self‐evident. Thus, in opposition to Schürer, he denies that the thought of the pre‐existence in heaven of all the good things belonging to the Kingdom of God was at all generally current in the Late‐Jewish world of ideas, and thinks that the occasional references(218) to a pre‐existing Jerusalem, which shall finally be brought down to the earth, do not suffice to establish the theory. Similarly, he thinks it doubtful whether Jesus used the terms “this world (age),” “the world (age) to come” in the eschatological sense which is generally attached to them, and doubts, on linguistic grounds, whether they can have been used at all. Even the use of עלם or עולם for “world” cannot be proved. In the pre‐ Christian period there is much reason to doubt its occurrence, though in later Jewish literature it is frequent. The expression ἐν τῇ παλιγγενεσίᾳ in Matt. xix. 28, is specifically Greek and cannot be reproduced in either Hebrew or Aramaic. It is very strange that the use which Jesus makes of _Amen_ is unknown in the whole of Jewish literature. According to the proper idiom of the language “אמן is never used to emphasise one’s own speech, but always with reference to the speech, prayer, benediction, oath, or curse of another.” Jesus, therefore, if He used the expression in this sense, must have given it a new meaning as a formula of asseveration, in place of the oath which He forbade.

All these acute observations are marked by the general tendency which was observable in the interpretation of the term Son of Man, that is, by the endeavour so to weaken down the eschatological conceptions of the Kingdom and the Messiah, that the hypothesis of a making‐present and spiritualising of these conceptions in the teaching of Jesus might appear inherently and linguistically possible and natural. The polemic against the pre‐existent realities of the Kingdom of God is intended to show that for Jesus the Reign of God is a present benefit, which can be sought after, given, possessed, and taken. Even before the time of Jesus, according to Dalman, a tendency had shown itself to lay less emphasis, in connexion with the hope of the future, upon the national Jewish element. Jesus forced this element still farther into the background, and gave a more decided prominence to the purely religious element. “For Him the reign of God was the Divine power, which from this time onward was steadily to carry forward the renewal of the world, and also the renewed world, into which men shall one day enter, which even now offers itself, and therefore can be grasped and received as a present good.” The supernatural coming of the Kingdom is only the final stage of the coming which is now being inwardly spiritually brought about by the preaching of Jesus. Though He may perhaps have spoken of “this” world and the “world to come,” these expressions had in His use of them no very special importance. It is for Him less a question of an antithesis between “then” and “now,” than of establishing a connexion between them by which the transition from one to the other is to be effected.

It is the same in regard to Jesus’ consciousness of His Messiahship. “In Jesus’ view,” says Dalman, “the period before the commencement of the Reign of God was organically connected with the actual period of His Reign.” He was the Messiah because He knew Himself to stand in a unique ethico‐religious relation to God. His Messiahship was not something wholly incomprehensible to those about Him. If redemption was regarded as being close at hand, the Messiah must be assumed to be in some sense already present. Therefore Jesus is both directly and indirectly spoken of as Messiah.

Thus the most important work in the department of Aramaic scholarship shows clearly the anti‐eschatological tendency which characterised it from the beginning. The work of Lietzmann, Meyer, Wellhausen, and Dalman, forms a distinct episode in the general resistance to eschatology. That Aramaic scholarship should have taken up a hostile attitude towards the eschatological system of thought of Jesus lies in the nature of things. The thoughts which it takes as its standard of comparison were only reduced to writing long after the period of Jesus, and, moreover, in a lifeless and distorted form, at a time when the apocalyptic temper no longer existed as the living counterpoise to the legal righteousness, and this legal righteousness had allowed only so much of Apocalyptic to survive as could be brought into direct connexion with it. In fact, the distance between Jesus’ world of thought and this form of Judaism is as great as that which separates it from modern ideas. Thus in Dalman modernising tendencies and Aramaic scholarship were able to combine in conducting a criticism of the eschatology in the teaching of Jesus in which the modern man thought the thoughts and the expert in Aramaic formulated and supported them, yet without being able in the end to make any impression upon the well‐rounded whole formed by Jesus’ eschatological preaching of the Kingdom.

Whether Aramaic scholarship will contribute to the investigation of the life and teaching of Jesus along other lines and in a direct and positive fashion, only the future can show. But certainly if theologians will give heed to the question‐marks so acutely placed by Dalman, and recognise it as one of their first duties to test carefully whether a thought or a connexion of thought is linguistically or inherently Greek, and only Greek, in character, they will derive a notable advantage from what has already been done in the department of Aramaic study.

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But if the service rendered by Aramaic studies has been hitherto mainly indirect, no success whatever has attended, or seems likely to attend, the attempt to apply Buddhist ideas to the explanation of the thoughts of Jesus. It could only indeed appear to have some prospect of success if we could make up our minds to follow the example of the author of one of the most recent of fictitious lives of Christ in putting Jesus to school to the Buddhist priests; in which case the six years which Monsieur Nicolas Notowitsch allots to this purpose, would certainly be none too much for the completion of the course.(219) If imagination boggles at this, there remains no possibility of showing that Buddhist ideas exercised any direct influence upon Jesus. That Buddhism may have had some kind of influence upon Late Judaism and thus indirectly upon Jesus is not inherently impossible, if we are prepared to recognise Buddhistic influence on the Babylonian and Persian civilisations. But it is unproved, unprovable, and unthinkable, that Jesus derived the suggestion of the new and creative ideas which emerge in His teaching from Buddhism. The most that can be done in this direction is to point to certain analogies. For the parables of Jesus, Buddhist parallels were suggested by Renan and Havet.(220)

How little these analogies mean in the eyes of a cautious observer is evident from the attitude which Max Müller took up towards the question. “That there are startling coincidences between Buddhism and Christianity,” he remarks in one passage,(221) “cannot be denied; and it must likewise be admitted that Buddhism existed at least four hundred years before Christianity. I go even further and say that I should be extremely grateful if anybody would point out to me the historical channels through which Buddhism had influenced early Christianity. I have been looking for such channels all my life, but hitherto I have found none. What I have found is that for some of the most startling coincidences there are historical antecedents on both sides; and if we once know these antecedents the coincidences become far less startling.”

A year before Max Müller formulated his impression in these terms, Rudolf Seydel(222) had endeavoured to explain the analogies which had been noticed by supposing Christianity to have been influenced by Buddhism. He distinguishes three distinct classes of analogies:

1. Those of which the points of resemblance can without difficulty be explained as due to the influence of similar sources and motives in the two cases.

2. Those which show a so special and unexpected agreement that it appears artificial to explain it from the action of similar causes, and the dependence of one upon the other commends itself as the most natural explanation.

3. Those in which there exists a reason for the occurrence of the idea only within the sphere of one of the two religions, or in which at least it can very much more easily be conceived as originating within the one than within the other, so that the inexplicability of the phenomenon within the one domain gives ground for seeking its source within the other.

This last class demands a literary explanation of the analogy. Seydel therefore postulates, alongside of primitive forms of Matthew and Luke, a third source, “a poetic‐apocalyptic Gospel of very early date which fitted its Christian material into the frame of a Buddhist type of Gospel, transforming, purifying, and ennobling the material taken from the foreign but related literature by a kind of rebirth inspired by the Christian Spirit.” Matthew and Luke, especially Luke, follow this poetic Gospel up to the point where historic sources become more abundant, and the primitive form of Mark begins to dominate their narrative. But even in later parts the influence of this poetical source, which as an independent document was subsequently lost, continued to make itself felt.

The strongest point of support for this hypothesis, if a mere conjecture can be described as such, is found by Seydel in the introductory narratives in Luke. Now it is not inherently impossible that Buddhist legends, which in one form or another were widely current in the East, may have contributed more or less to the formation of the mythical preliminary history. Who knows the laws of the formation of legend? Who can follow the course of the wind which carries the seed over land and sea? But in general it may be said that Seydel actually refutes the hypothesis which he is defending. If the material which he brings forward is all that there is to suggest a relation between Buddhism and Christianity, we are justified in waiting until new discoveries are made in that quarter before asserting the necessity of a Buddhist primitive Gospel. That will not prevent a succession of theosophic Lives of Jesus from finding their account in Seydel’s classical work. Seydel indeed delivered himself into their hands, because he did not entirely avoid the rash assumption of theosophic “historical science” that Jewish eschatology can be equated with Buddhistic.

Eduard von Hartmann, in the second edition of his work, “The Christianity of the New Testament,”(223) roundly asserts that there can be no question of any relation of Jesus to Buddha, nor of any indebtedness either in His teaching or in the later moulding of the story of His life, but only of a parallel formation of myth.

XVIII. THE POSITION OF THE SUBJECT AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

_Oskar Holtzmann._ Das Leben Jesu. Tübingen, 1901. 417 pp.

Das Messianitätsbewusstsein Jesu und seine neueste Bestreitung. Vortrag. (The Messianic Consciousness of Jesus and the most recent denial of it. A Lecture.) 1902. 26 pp. (Against Wrede.)

War Jesus Ekstatiker? (Was Jesus an ecstatic?) Tübingen, 1903. 139 pp.

_Paul Wilhelm Schmidt._ Die Geschichte Jesu. (The History of Jesus.) Freiburg. 1899. 175 pp. (4th impression.)

Die Geschichte Jesu. Erläutert. Mit drei Karten von Prof. K. Furrer (Zürich). (The History of Jesus. Preliminary Discussions. With three maps by Prof. K. Furrer of Zurich.) Tübingen, 1904. 414 pp.

_Otto Schmiedel._ Die Hauptprobleme der Leben‐Jesu‐Forschung. (The main Problems in the Study of the Life of Jesus.) Tübingen, 1902. 71 pp. 2nd ed., 1906.

_Hermann Freiherr von Soden._ Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu. (The most important Questions about the Life of Jesus.) Vacation Lectures. Berlin, 1904. 111 pp.

_Gustav Frenssen._ Hilligenlei. Berlin, 1905, pp. 462‐593: “Die Handschrift.” (“The Manuscript”—in which a Life of Jesus, written by one of the characters of the story, is given in full.)

_Otto Pfleiderer._ Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehren in geschichtlichem Zusammenhang beschrieben. (Primitive Christianity. Its Documents and Doctrines in their Historical Context.) 2nd ed. Berlin, 1902. Vol. i., 696 pp.

Die Entstehung des Urchristentums. (How Primitive Christianity arose.) Munich, 1905. 255 pp.

_Albert Kalthoff._ Das Christus‐Problem. Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie. (The Christ‐problem. The Ground‐plan of a Social Theology.) Leipzig, 1902. 87 pp.

Die Entstehung des Christentums. Neue Beiträge zum Christus‐ Problem. (How Christianity arose. New contributions to the Christ‐ problem.) Leipzig, 1904. 155 pp.

_Eduard von Hartmann._ Das Christentum des Neuen Testaments. (The Christianity of the New Testament.) 2nd revised edition of “Letters on the Christian Religion.” Sachsa‐in‐the‐Harz, 1905. 311 pp.

_De Jonge._ Jeschua. Der klassische jüdische Mann. Zerstörung des kirchlichen, Enthüllung des jüdischen Jesus‐Bildes. Berlin, 1904. 112 pp. (Jeshua. The Classical Jewish Man. In which the Jewish picture of Jesus is unveiled, and the ecclesiastical picture destroyed.)

_Wolfgang Kirchbach._ Was lehrte Jesus? Zwei Urevangelien. (What was the teaching of Jesus? Two Primitive Gospels.) Berlin, 1897. 248 pp. 2nd revised and greatly enlarged edition, 1902, 339 pp.

_Albert Dulk._ Der Irrgang des Lebens Jesu. In geschichtlicher Auffassung dargestellt. (The Error of the Life of Jesus. An Historical View.) 1st part, 1884, 395 pp.; 2nd part, 1885, 302 pp.

_Paul de Régla._ Jesus von Nazareth. German by A. Just. Leipzig, 1894. 435 pp.

_Ernest Bosc._ La Vie ésotérique de Jésus de Nazareth et les origines orientales du christianisme. (The secret Life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Oriental Origins of Christianity.) Paris, 1902.

The ideal Life of Jesus of the close of the nineteenth century is the Life which Heinrich Julius Holtzmann did not write—but which can be pieced together from his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels and his New Testament Theology.(224) It is ideal because, for one thing, it is unwritten, and arises only in the idea of the reader by the aid of his own imagination, and, for another, because it is traced only in the most general outline. What Holtzmann gives us is a sketch of the public ministry, a critical examination of details, and a full account of the teaching of Jesus. He provides, therefore, the plan and the prepared building material, so that any one can carry out the construction in his own way and on his own responsibility. The cement and the mortar are not provided by Holtzmann; every one must decide for himself how he will combine the teaching and the life, and arrange the details within each.

We may recall the fact that Weisse, too, the other founder of the Marcan hypothesis, avoided writing a Life of Jesus, because the difficulty of fitting the details into the ground‐plan appeared to him so great, not to say insuperable. It is just this modesty which constitutes his greatness and Holtzmann’s. Thus the Marcan hypothesis ends, as it had begun, with a certain historical scepticism.(225)

The subordinates, it is true, do not allow themselves to be disturbed by the change of attitude at head‐quarters. They keep busily at work. That is their right, and therein consists their significance. By keeping on trying to take the positions, and constantly failing, they furnish a practical proof that the plan of operations worked out by the general staff is not capable of being carried out, and show why it is so, and what kind of new tactics will have to be evolved.

The credit of having written a life of Christ which is strictly scientific, in its own way very remarkable, and yet foredoomed to failure, belongs to Oskar Holtzmann.(226) He has complete confidence in the Marcan plan, and makes it his task to fit all the sayings of Jesus into this framework, to show “what can belong to each period of the preaching of Jesus, and what cannot.” His method is to give free play to the magnetic power of the most important passages in the Marcan text, making other sayings of similar import detach themselves from their present connexion and come and group themselves round the main passages.

For example, the controversy with the scribes at Jerusalem regarding the charge of doing miracles by the help of Satan (Mark iii. 22‐30) belongs, according to Holtzmann, as regards content and chronology, to the same period as the controversy, in Mark vii., about the ordinances of men which results in Jesus being “obliged to take to flight”; the woes pronounced upon Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, which now follow on the eulogy upon the Baptist (Matt. xi. 21‐23), and are accordingly represented as having been spoken at the time of the sending forth of the Twelve, are drawn by the same kind of magnetic force into the neighbourhood of Mark vii., and “express very clearly the attitude of Jesus at the time of His withdrawal from the scene of His earlier ministry.” The saying in Matt.