Page:Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911).djvu/322

 usually supposed by hypothetical Pauline influences. In the second edition his positive knowledge has been ground down in the struggle with the sceptics-it is Brandt who has especially affected him-and with the partisans of eschatology. This is the first advance-guard action of modern theology coming into touch with the troops of Reimarus and Bruno Bauer.

Pfieiderer accepts the purely eschatological conception of the Kingdom of God and holds also that the ethics of Jesus were wholly conditioned by eschatology. But in regard to the question of the Messiahship of Jesus he takes his stand with the sceptics. He rejects the hypothesis of a Messiah who, as being a "spiritual Messiah," conceals His claim, but on the other hand, he cannot accept the eschatological Son-of-Man Messiahship having reference to the future, which the eschatological school finds in the utterances of Jesus, since it implies prophecies of His suffering, death, and resurrection which criticism cannot admit. Instead of finding the explanation of how the Messianic title arose to the reflections of Jesus about the death which lay before Him," he is inclined to find it "rather in the reflection of the Christian community upon the catastrophic death and exaltation of its Lord after this had actually taken place."

Even the Marcan narrative is not history. The scepticism in regard to the main source, with which writers like Oskar Holtzmann, Schmiedel, and von Soden conduct a kind of intellectual flirtation, is here erected into a principle. "It must be recognised," says Pfleiderer, "that in respect of the recasting of the history under theological influences, the whole of our Gospels stand in principle on the same footing. The distinction between Mark, the other two Synoptists, and John is only relative-a distinction of degree corresponding to different stages of theological reflection and the development of the ecclesiastical consciousness." If only Bruno Bauer could have lived to see this triumph of his opinions!

Pfleiderer, however, is conscious that scepticism, too, has its difficulties. He wishes, indeed, to reject the confession of Jesus before the Sanhedrin "because its historicity is not well established (none of the disciples were present to hear it, and the apocalyptic prophecy which is added. Mark xiv. 62, is certainly derived from the ideas of the primitive Church)"; on the other hand, he is inclined to admit as possibilities-though marking them with a note of interrogation-that Jesus may have accepted the homage of the Passover pilgrims, and that the controversy with the Scribes