Page:Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911).djvu/172

 the Life of Jesus, but that did not prevent their making something of a sensation at the time when they appeared. Jesus, according to his narrative, was the son of a member of the Essene Order. The child was watched over by the Order and prepared for His future mission. He entered on His public ministry as a tool of the Essenes, who after the crucifixion took Him down from the cross and resuscitated Him.

These "Disclosures" only preserve the more external features of Venturini's representation. His Life of Jesus had been more than a mere romance, it had been an imaginative solution of problems which he had intuitively perceived. It may be regarded as the Forerunner of rationalistic criticism. The problems which Venturini had intuitively perceived were not solved either by the rationalists, or by Strauss, or by Weisse. These writers had not succeeded in providing that of which Venturini had dreamed�a living purposeful connexion between the events of the life of Jesus�or in explaining His Person and Work as having a relation, either positive or negative, to the circumstances of Late Judaism. Venturini's plan, however fantastic, connects the life of Jesus with Jewish history and contemporary thought much more closely than any other Life of Jesus, for that connexion is of course vital to the plot of the romance. In Weisse's "Gospel History" criticism had deliberately renounced the attempt to explain Jesus directly from Judaism, finding itself unable to establish any connexion between His teach- ings and contemporary Jewish ideas. The way was therefore once more open to the imagination. Accordingly several imaginative Lives preluded a new era in the study of the subject, in so far as they endeavoured to understand Jesus on the basis of purely Jewish ideas, in some cases as affirming these, in others as opposing them in favour of a more spiritual conception. In Gfrorer, Richard von der Aim, and Noack, begins the skirmishing preparatory to the future battle over escha- tology.

After He had lost consciousness upon the cross He was succoured by Joseph of Arimathea and Pilate's wife contrary to His own expectation and purpose. He ended His days among the Essenes.

Salvator looks to a spiritualised mystical Mosaism as destined to be the successful rival of Christianity.