Page:Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911).djvu/262

 of the main line intended for "contemporary views" traffic, a relief line for the accommodation of through trains of "non-temporally limited ideas"; and at the point where primitive Christian eschatology becomes of less importance they switch off the train to the relief line, after slipping the carriages which are not intended to go beyond that station. This procedure has now been rendered impossible for them by Weiss, who leaves no place in the teaching of Jesus for anything but the single-line traffic of eschatology. If, during the last fifteen years, any one had attempted to carry out in a work on a large scale the plan of Strauss and Renan, linking up the history of the life of Jesus with the history of early Christianity, and New Testament theology with the early history of dogma, the immense difficulties which Weiss had raised without suspecting it, in the course of his sixty-seven pages, would have become clearly apparent. The problem of the Hellenisation of Christianity took on quite a new aspect when the trestle bridge of modern ideas connecting the eschatological early Christianity with Greek theology broke down under the weight of the newly-discovered material, and it became necessary to seek within the history itself an explanation of the way in which an exclusively eschatological system of ideas came to admit Greek influences, and-what is much more difficult to explain-how Hellenism, on its part, found any point of contact with an eschatological sect.

The new problem is as yet hardly recognised, much less grappled with. The few who since Weiss's time have sought to pass over from the life of Jesus to early Christianity, have acted like men who find themselves on an ice-floe which is slowly dividing into two pieces, and who leap from one to the other before the cleft grows too wide. Harnack, in his "What is Christianity?" almost entirely ignores the contemporary limitations of Jesus' teaching, and starts out with a Gospel which carries him down without difficulty to the year 1899. The anti-historical violence of this procedure is, if possible, still more pronounced in Wernle. The Beginnings of our Religion" begins by putting the Jewish eschatology in a convenient posture for the coming operation by urging that the idea of the Messiah, since there was no appropriate place for it in connexion with the Kingdom of God or the new Earth, had become obsolete for the Jews themselves.

The inadequateness of the Messianic idea for the purposes of Jesus is therefore self-evident. "His whole life long"-as if we knew any more of it than the few months of His public ministry!-"He laboured to give a new and higher content to the Messianic title which He had adopted." In the course of this endeavour He