Page:Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911).djvu/181

 away in the fires of Strauss's criticism.

There remains only a fundamental conception which has a certain greatness�a brotherhood which looks for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven appoints one of its members to undergo as Messiah an atoning death, that the coming of the Kingdom, for which the time is at hand, may not be delayed. This brotherhood is the only fictitious element in the whole construction�much as in the primitive steam-engine the valves were still worked by hand while the rest of the machinery was actuated by its own motive-power. So in this Life of Jesus the motive-power is drawn entirely from historical sources, and the want of an automatic starting arrangement is a mere anachronism. Strike out the superfluous role of Joseph of Arimathea, and the distinction of the two Messiahs, which is not clear even in the Rabbis, and substitute the simple hypothesis that Jesus, in the course of His Messianic vocation, when He thinks the time for the coming of the Kingdom has arrived, goes freely to Jerusalem, and, as it were, compels the secular power to put Him to death, in order by this act of atonement to win for the world the immediate coming of the Kingdom, and for Himself the glory of the Son of Man�make these changes, and you have a life of Jesus in which the motive-power is a purely historical force. It is impossible to indicate briefly all the parts of which the seemingly complicated, but in reality impressively simple, mechanism of this Life of Jesus is composed. The conduct of Jesus, alike in its resolution and in its hesitation, becomes clear, and not less so that of the disciples. All far-fetched historical ingenuity is dispensed with. Jesus acts "because His hour is come." This decisive placing of the Life of Jesus in the "last time" (cf. 1 Peter i. 20 fanerwqentoV de ep' escatwn twn cronwn di umaV) is an historical achievement without parallel. Not less so is the placing of the thought of the passion in its proper eschatological setting as an act of atonement. Where had the character and origin of the primitive community ever been brought into such clear connexion with the death of Jesus? Who had ever before so earnestly considered the problem why the Christian community arose in Jerusalem and not in Galilee? "But the solution is too simple, and, moreover, is not founded on a severely scientific chain of reasoning, but on historical intuition and experiment, the simple experiment of introducing the Life of Jesus into the Jewish eschatological world of thought"�so the theologians replied, or so, at least, they might have replied if they had taken this curious work seriously, if, indeed, they had read it at all. But how were they to suspect that in a book which seemed to aim at founding a new Deistic Church, and which went out with the Wolfenuttel Fragmentist into the desert of the most barren natural religion, a valuable historical conception might be found? It is true that