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 He undertakes the training of disciples. He was a teacher and yet is said to have held Himself to be the Messiah." The duality lies not so much in the teaching itself; it is rather a cleavage between His conviction and consciousness on the one hand, and His public attitude on the other.

To this observation we have to add a second, namely, that Jesus cannot possibly during the last few days at Jerusalem have come forward as Messiah. Critics, with the exception, of course, of Bruno Bauer, had only cursorily touched on this question. The course of events in the last few days in Jerusalem does not at all suggest a Messianic claim on the part of Jesus, indeed it directly contradicts it. Only imagine what would have happened if Jesus had come before the people with such claims, or even if such thoughts had been so much as attributed to Him! On the other side, of course, we have the report of the Messianic entry, in which Jesus not only accepted the homage offered to Him as Messiah, but went out of His way to invite it; and the people must therefore from that point onwards have regarded him as Messiah. In consequence of this contradiction in the narrative, all Lives of Jesus slur over the passage, and seem to represent that the people sometimes suspected Jesus' Messiahship, sometimes did not suspect it, or they adopt some other similar expedient. Brandt, however, rigorously drew the logical inference. Since Jesus did not stand and preach in the temple as Messiah, He cannot have entered Jerusalem as Messiah. Therefore "the well-known Messianic entry is not historical." That is also implied by the manner of His arrest. If Jesus had come forward as a Messianic claimant, He would not simply have been arrested by the civil police; Pilate would have had to suppress a revolt by military force.

This admission implies the surrender of one of the most cherished prejudices of the anti-eschatological school, namely, that Jesus raised the thoughts of the people to a higher conception of His Messiahship, and consequently to a spiritual view of the Kingdom of God, or at least tried so to raise them. But we cannot assume this to have been His intention, since He does not allow the multitude to suspect His Messiahship. Thus the conception of a "transformation" becomes untenable as a means of reconciling eschatological and non-eschatological elements. And as a matter of fact-that is the stroke of critical genius in the book-Brandt lets the two go forward side by side without any attempt at reconciliation; for the reconciliation which would be possible when one had only to deal with the teaching of Jesus becomes impossible when one has to take in His life as well. For Brandt the life of Jesus is the life of a Galilaean teacher who, in consequence of the eschatology with which the period was so fully charged, was for a time and certain extent set at variance with