earthly ends, and from representing a certain kind of social and political order as identical with the kingdom of God, or as inseparable from it. In accordance with His knowledge of God, He knew that earthly well-being as such did not belong to the true nature of the kingdom of God, but a higher welfare to be perfected in heaven, and not certain outward forms of conduct as such, but an inward righteousness; and so He regarded it as the task of the Messiah to lead men only to the attainment of the true heavenly blessedness and the true inward righteousness of the kingdom of God, but not to amalgamate any kind of outward endeavours for earthly ends with His Messianic task.

The decisive reason for the uniquely lofty intensity and purity of the religious, and indeed moral-religious character of the teaching of Jesus, is everywhere shown in the fact that Jesus not only in general made the idea of God, but specially the idea of the moral fatherhood of God, the principle of His collective thought and aim; and this principle He has carried out with marvellous consistency. Just herein we found also the basis of the epoch-making advance of His teaching in relation to the Old Testament Jewish religious teaching. We cannot regard this advance as immaterial because Jesus found a manifold foundation in the Old Testament Jewish religion, both for that leading principle and for the separate elements of His religious view. The existence of this foundation was nevertheless the necessary condition for the teaching of Jesus being able to originate as a branch of a, for us, intelligible historical develop

ment, and that it could be successfully operative. Along with this, however, there remains the great and thoroughly original revelation - work of Jesus that He brought into prominence from among the traditional elements of the Old Testament Jewish religion, and carried fully out those elements, whence there resulted, as to the religious view, a new uniform whole, which more purely and perfectly corresponded to the specific religious interests. Both Pharisaism and Alexandrinism were extensions of the Old Testament religion; but in comparison with them, with the Pharisaic legalism and the Philonian speculation, the greatness of the teaching of Jesus, its simplicity and inwardness, its purely religious, and at the same time deeply moral character, shine forth with special clear

ness.

The highest thing we have to say of Jesus, however, is that with Him teaching and life were perfectly blended. His teaching rested on His own inner experience; His works and sufferings, on the other hand, were a vivid representation and a grand attestation of His teaching. Thus He was more than a mere teacher of a new religion; He was at the same time the perfect representative of the religious relationship to God which He taught. In this inward harmony of holy teaching and living, He moved in the presence of His disciples, and we can well comprehend that from the short space of time during which they were with Him, although they were able to understand and hold fast only a little of the contents of His teaching, which struck them at first as something so new and strange, yet they

retained the indelible impression of having seen and experienced in their midst in His human appearance the perfect revelation of God,-an impression which the apostolic writer of the discourses of the fourth Gospel has summed up in the words: "The revelation became flesh, and tabernacled among us; and we beheld His glory, a glory as of the only-begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. For out of His fulness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" (John i. 14, 16, 17).1

3. In our foregoing account we have sought to gain a view of the teaching of Jesus at first from the Gospel of Mark and the Matthew-Logia alone, that is, from those elements in our three Gospels which, from the marks contained in these Gospels themselves of literary relationship and connection, betoken themselves as the oldest traditional records of the teaching of Jesus recognisable by us. Consequently we have not only abstained from using such elements of the synoptical Gospels as are to be regarded partly as secondary formations from the redaction of both those main sources, partly as additions on the ground of obscure later tradition, but we have also allowed the material recorded in the fourth Gospel to have no influence on our representation of the organism of the teaching of Jesus as a whole, or on the detailed treatment of the particular members of this whole.

1 On the connection of the thought of this passage, which the redacting evangelist has interrupted by the interpolation of ver. 15, c£ L. J. i. p. 219 ff.

The recorded tradition of the teaching of Jesus in both these main sources, the Gospel of Mark and the Matthew - Logia, is certainly still subject to many questions and doubts. Since the Gospel of Mark is no immediate report of an eye- and ear-witness, and in its very composition shows manifold traces of an earlier tradition that has been worked over, it is necessary to use critically the contents of this the oldest of our Gospels, and to abstain from using some portions of it, especially of the parousia - discourse, because they are recognisable as later additions to the original tradition. The Matthew-Logia, on the other hand, have been preserved for us, not directly, but only in the twofold redaction of our first and third evangelists, and out of these redactions are discerned only in part with tolerable certainty, but in part also merely with a certain probability. Alike with reference to that criticism of Mark's Gospel as with reference to this reconstruction of the Matthew-Logia, the opinions of scholars, even when they are agreed on the essential questions, show manifold divergencies in the details. But if we cannot once succeed in fixing with perfect certainty the substance of the oldest apostolic tradition as to the words of Jesus as worked over in our Gospels, we must, of course, still more fail in arriving at indubitable certainty as to the original wording of the sayings of Jesus Himself. But, on the other hand, it is true that the questions and the dubiety which here remain do not affect the whole and the essential, but only small and external points, i in regard to which it is by no means important to have infallible knowledge. In regard to the contents

of the original teaching of Jesus, on the whole we can, in my opinion, gain a quite certain view from the clearly recognisable main elements of the oldest tradition in our synoptical Gospels. I hope I have proved by this work that the view of the teaching of Jesus unfolded from the Gospel of Mark and the Matthew-Logia is a quite self-consistent one, whose particular parts stand in organic connection with one another and with the leading principle of the whole, and that it is at the same time throughout a historically and psychologically intelligible view. The fact that the Gospel of Mark, so far as it appears to rest on the basis of an older source, and the MatthewLogia, so far as they can be sifted with simple literarycritical judgment from our first and third Gospels, supply such a material of the teaching of Jesus as combines into a view of the teaching as a whole, so inwardly consistent and so historically and psychologically intelligible, furnishes a splendid proof that in these the oldest known traditions we possess really genuine and historically valuable traditions. The idea that the severely critical consideration of the Gospels, which examines these writings according to the same principles as other written historical sources, would render problematical the historical figure of Jesus, or at all events would derogate from the ideal loftiness and purity of His life and teaching, we must at this day pronounce as simply obsolete. Critical inquiry has led, though not immediately in its first attempts, yet gradually and in course of time, to results whereby the historical picture of Jesus has lost nothing, but only gained. If we now, in the case