Page:Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911).djvu/309

 such as this? Bahrdt and Venturini hardly read more subjective interpretations into the text than many modern Lives of Jesus; and the hypothesis of the secret society, which after all did recognise and do justice to the inexplicability from an external standpoint of the relation of events and of the conduct of Jesus, was in many respects more historical than the psychological links of connexion which our modernising historians discover without having any foundation for them in the text.

In the end this supplementary knowledge destroys the historicity of the simplest sections. Oskar Holtzmann ventures to conjecture that the healing of the blind man at Jericho "is to be understood as a symbolical representation of the conversion of Zacchaeus," which, of course, is found only in Luke. Here then the defender of the Marcan hypothesis rejects the incident by which the Evangelist explains the enthusiasm of the entry into Jerusalem, not to mention that Luke tells us nothing whatever about a conversion of Zacchaeus, but only that Jesus was invited to his house and graciously accepted the invitation.

It would be something if this almost Alexandrian symbolical exegesis contributed in some way to the removal of difficulties and to the solution of the main question, that, namely, of the present or future Messiah, the present or future Kingdom. Oskar Holtzmann lays great stress upon the eschatological character of the preaching of Jesus regarding the Kingdom, and assumes that, at least at the beginning, it would not have been natural for His hearers to understand that Jesus, the herald of the Messiah, was Himself the Messiah. Nevertheless, he is of opinion that, in a certain sense, the presence of Jesus implied the presence of the Kingdom, that Peter and the rest of the disciples, advancing beyond the ideas of the multitude, recognised Him as Messiah, that this recognition ought to have been possible for the people also, and, in that case, would have been "the strongest incentive to abandon evil ways," and "that Jesus at the time of His entry into Jerusalem seems to have felt that in Isa. lxii. 11 there was a direct command not to withhold the knowledge of His Messiahship from the inhabitants of Jerusalem."

But if Jesus made a Messianic entry He must thereafter have given Himself out as Messiah, and the whole controversy would necessarily have turned upon this claim. This, however, was not the case. According Holtzmann, all that the hearers could make out of that crucial question for the Messiahship in Mark xii. 35-37 was only "that Jesus clearly showed from the Scriptures that the Messiah was not in reality the son of David."