Note 86 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

Now, it has been shown that the Gospel picture of Jesus is not without deficiencies. We may see a proof86 of the historical nature of the events referred to in small traits, as, for example, in Jesus’ temporary inability to perform miracles,87 the circumstance that he is not represented as omniscient,88 the attitude of his relatives to him.89 So the theologian Schmiedel set up first five and then nine passages as “clearly credible,” and pronounced these to be the basis of a really scientific knowledge of Jesus. The passages are Mark x. 17 sqq. (Why callest thou me good?), Matt. xii. 31 sqq. (The sin against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven), Mark iii. 21 (He is beside himself), Mark xiii. 32 (But the day and the hour is known to no man), Mark xv. 24 (My God, why has thou forsaken me?), Mark vi. 5 (And he could there do no mighty work), Mark viii. 12 (There shall no sign be given unto this generation), Mark viii. 14–21 (Reproaching the disciples on the occasion of the lack of bread), Matt. xi. 5 (The blind see, the lame walk). All these “bases” evidently have a firm support only on the supposition that the Gospels are meant to paint a stainless ideal, a God, that they are at most but a conception, such, perhaps, as has been set up by Bruno Bauer. But they are useless from the point of view intended, as portraying a man. If, however, the Evangelists’ intention was to paint the celestial Christ of the Apostle Paul, the God-man, the abstract spirit-being, as a completely real man for the eyes of the faithful, to place him on the ground of historical reality, and so to treat seriously Paul’s “idea” of humanity, they were obliged to give him also human characteristics. And these could be either invented afresh or taken from the actual life of honoured teachers, in which the fact is acknowledged that, even for the noblest and best of men, there are hours of despair and grief, that the prophet is worth nothing in his own fatherland, or is even unknown to his nearest relatives. Even the prophet Elijah, the Old Testament precursor of the Messiah, who has in many ways determined the picture of Jesus, is said to have had moments of despair in which he wanted to die, till God strengthened him anew to the fulfilment of his vocation.90 Moreover, Mark x. 17 was a commonplace in all ancient philosophy from the time of Plato, and gained that form by an alteration of the original text (A. Pott, “Der Text des Neuen Testaments nach seiner gesch. Entwicklung” in “Aus Natur und Geisteswelt,” 1906, p. 63, sq.); Mark xiv. 24 is taken from the 22nd Psalm, which has also in other respects determined the details of the account of the crucifixion. Mark iii. 21 is, as Schleiermacher showed and Strauss corroborated, a pure invention of the Evangelist, the words of the Pharisees being put into their mouths, as their opinion, in order to explain Jesus’ answer by the assertion of his kinship (Strauss, “Leben Jesu,” i. 692; cf. also Psa. lix. 1: “I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children”). Matt. xi. 5 is based on Isaiah xxxv. 5, xlii. 7, xlix. 9, lxi. 1, which runs in the Septuagint: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the poor; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to the blind the opening of their eyes; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.”91 Schmiedel’s nine “bases” consequently are at most testimony to a “lost glory”; but the construction of a “really scientific” life of Jesus cannot possibly arise from them.92