Page:Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911).djvu/146

 did not hold the Law to be binding. It was for this reason that He did not go up to the Feasts. He distinctly and repeatedly expressed the conviction that His doctrine was destined for the whole world. In speaking of the parousia of the Son of Man He was using a figure�a figure which includes in a mysterious fashion all His predictions of the future. He did not speak to His disciples of His resurrection, His ascension, and His parousia as three distinct acts, since the event to which He looked forward is not identical with any of the three, but is composed of them all. The resurrection is, at the same time, the ascension and parousia, and in the parousia the resurrection and the ascension are also included. "The one conclusion to which we believe we can point with certainty is that Jesus spoke of the future of His work and His teaching in a way that implied the consciousness of an influence to be continued after His death, whether unbrokenly or intermittently, and the consciousness that by this influence His work and teaching would be preserved from destruction and the final victory assured to it."

The personal presence of Jesus which the disciples experienced after His death was in their view only a partial fulfilment of that general promise. The parousia appeared to them as still awaiting fulfilment, Thought of thus, as an isolated event, they could only conceive it from the Jewish apocalyptic standpoint, and they finally came to suppose that they had derived these fantastic ideas from the Master Himself.

In his determined opposition to the recognition of eschatology in Strauss's first Life of Jesus, Weisse here lays down the lines which were to be followed by the "liberal" Lives of Jesus of the 'sixties and following years, which only differ from him, not always to their advantage, in their more elaborate interpretation of the detail of Mark. The only work, therefore, which was a conscious continuation of Strauss's, takes, in spite of its just appreciation of the character of the sources, a wrong path, led astray by the mistaken idea of the "originality" of Jesus, which it exalts into a canon of historical criticism. Only after long and devious wanderings did the study of the subject find the right road again. The whole struggle over eschatology is nothing else than a gradual elimination of Wiesse's ideas. It was only with Johannes Weiss that theology escaped from the influence of Christian Hermann Weisse.