as an isolated act of experience, which on account of its peculiar nature had also peculiar effects, but that, as we have previously explained it, He regarded it as a specific manifestation of His work of preaching, to which He made His Messianic task and saving significance in general refer, is clearly evident because of His bringing in, immediately after this declaration as to the significance of His death, the exhortation to use the light so long as one has the light (xii. 35 f.), and because, when He designated Himself as this light sent into the world, He connected with the verbal teaching committed to Him by God the same effects on the one hand judging, on the other hand leading to eternal life (vers. 44-50), as He formerly designated the effects of His death.1

Whilst in the discourses of the fourth Gospel the inward connection of the death of Jesus with His general Messianic work is made clearly prominent, and the saving significance of His death is understood according to the analogy of the saving significance of His Messianic work of teaching as a whole, there is absent here, just as in the synoptical discourses, an expression of the thought that Jesus, by His mortal sufferings experienced by Him as innocent, and borne by Him in pure obedience, has established a special foundation for the gracious will of God to the forgiveness of sins. The absence of this thought is the more remarkable, since not only does the evangelist who redacts the Johannine sources

1 On the original connection of the words xii. 44 ff. with ver. 35 f. which is broken up in the most disturbing way by the interpolation, vers. 366-43, pointing back to the redacting evangelist, cf. L. J. i. p. 236 f.

put into the mouth of the Baptist the declaration that Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (i. 29, 36), but since also the author of the First Epistle of John, who must have been identical with the writer of the source of the Johannine discourses, on his part presents this idea, which was so early and strongly implanted in the apostolic circle of thought, namely, that the saving significance of Christ was meant specially to refer to His mediation in regard to forgiveness of sins for men (1 John ii. 2; iv. 10). In the fact that the apostolic writer of the source of the Johannine discourses does not give this idea as uttered by Jesus Himself, and in this point also agrees with the synoptical reports of the teaching of Jesus, we ought not to see an accidental omission, which, in accordance with the contents of the First Epistle of John, we would be justified in simply supplying, but we must find in it a characteristic proof that the author of this Johannine source, with all his freedom in formally shaping the words of Jesus, yet did not simply construct the contents of the thought according to His own mode of view, but has rendered them on the ground of true recollections of the utterances of the historical Jesus Himself.

6. Our opinion, derived from the different gospelsources, that the ideas of Jesus in regard to the necessity and saving significance of His sufferings and death were in inner harmony with His ideas of the nature and significance of His Messianic work in general, and with His collective religious view of God and His kingdom, must now, however, be still sup

plemented by the affirmation that this idea, of the necessity and saving value of the most dreadful sufferings and death, could only arise from this collective religious view, namely, the idea of the purity of the fatherly loving will of God, and of the distinction between the true eternal welfare of men and external earthly happiness, and of the inward righteousness manifesting itself in helpful love to men. We must recognise in this idea a specially new and characteristic element of the teaching of Jesus which could not have belonged to the Old Testament Jewish religious view, since this did not possess the necessary condition for establishing it. It is certainly true that, even to the Old Testament Jewish consciousness, on the ground of the experiences which individuals and the people of Israel in general had made, the idea of the suffering of the just was not wanting: and as the Christian Church afterwards, in the impressive delincations of this suffering given in Ps. xxii. and Isa. liii., saw prophecies of the suffering of Christ, so Jesus Himself also without doubt had already found in these Scriptures a foundation for His idea of suffering and a confirmatory testimony to its truth. But yet we must not mistake the great difference between the Old Testament view of the suffering of the just and that of Jesus in regard to His own suffering. There the just man suffers in spite of his being just; his suffering is a great riddle which sometimes awakes the anxious question as to the Why and the How long, and the despairing idea of the arbitrary estrangement of God, and is sometimes explained from the idea of vicarious suffering of the innocent for

the guilt of others, but which yet always finds its proper solution in the thought that a state of doubled earthly prosperity follows earthly suffering. The idea of Jesus of the necessity of suffering even for one who stands in perfect love and blessed fellowship with God, since earthly blessedness is not the true blessedness, and since a true piety is impossible without renunciation and stooping to minister to others, is unknown to the Old Testament. If later Judaism is also occupied with the idea of the suffering Messiah,1 it is yet true that this idea not only remained as a theological theory of particular Rabbins and at the time of Jesus was remote from the religious consciousness of the Jews, but especially also that the sorrows of the Messiah, which were supposed by the Jews to be possible, and which He must suffer at the head of His people in the time of conflict against the worldpowers for the establishment of the Messianic kingdom, and through which He would press on to victory and glory, are quite different in their kind from the sufferings which Jesus experienced at the hands of the leaders of the people, and to which He, judged externally, succumbed in death. In this idea that the earthly life-sacrifice of the Messiah was His necessary and greatest act, whereby His vocation-work was to be perfectly completed, and whereby, in spite of all outward appearance, the success of His work was not destroyed but confirmed, Jesus has drawn the highest consequence of His collective religious view. would not be historically right were we to say that

It

1 Cf. Schürer's History of the Jewish People, p. 464 ff. (transl., Div. II. vol. ii. p. 184); Baldensperger, Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, p. 120 ff.

for His whole teaching this idea of the crucifixion formed the pivot as it did for the preaching of Paul (cf. e.g. 1 Cor. ii. 2; Gal. iii. 1). So far as we can judge from our sources, Jesus, only at the close of His ministry and only to the narrower circle of His disciples, gave instructions in regard to the necessity of His death, and only in particular significant utterances brought into prominence the beneficial value of His death, for the community of His disciples. But certainly this idea formed the culminating point of His teaching, which could only have risen to this height, where such a foundation existed as is laid in His collective teaching as to the kingdom of God.

CHAP. IV. THE HEAVENLY FUTURE OF THE MESSIAH.

1. Along with the assurance that His death would result, not in the destruction, but rather in the strengthening and furtherance of His Messianic work, Jesus united the confident trust that His death would not bring real annihilation to His person, but rather heavenly life. This trust was not a manifestation of His special Messianic consciousness, according to which He, on account of His unique Messianic significance, also held in prospect a unique victory over death; but it was simply occasioned by the fact that He applied to Himself the view of salvation which He preached to others. For to His collective view of the kingdom of God belonged, as an essential element, the idea of the eternal heavenly life as the only true and enduring Good, for whose sake men