So be it: Wrede's thesis is here, after all, part of the common content of the "liberal" ideal, which cannot stand. But how does his critic make good the converse of a would-be Messiah who was no Teacher, but yet had disciples, and was finally crucified for making a secret Messianic claim? The answer is too naïve to be guessed. Accepting, in defiance of every suggestion of common sense, the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Dr. Schweitzer decides that "the episode was Messianic for Jesus, but not Messianic for the people." With no authority save the documents which at this point he radically and recklessly alters, he decides that the multitude had hailed Jesus "as the Prophet, as Elias," whatever the texts may say; and Jesus, feeling he was the Messiah, "played with his Messianic self-consciousness" all the while. Why, then, was he put to death? Simply because Judas betrayed his secret to the priests! Dr. Schweitzer can see well enough the futility of the betrayal story as it stands, inasmuch as Judas is paid to do what was not required--identifying a well-known public figure. But rather than admit myth here he will invent a better story for himself, and we get this: Jesus had dropped Messianic hints to his disciples, and Judas sold the information. And all the while none of the other disciples knew this, though at the trial the priests went among the people and induced them "not to agree to the Procurator's proposal. How? By telling them why He was condemned; by revealing to them the Messianic secret. That makes him at once from a prophet worthy of honour into a deluded enthusiast and blasphemer." [217] "In the name of the Prophet, figs!" Dr. Schweitzer has, he believes, saved the character of "the mob of Jerusalem" at last; and by what a device! By assuming that to claim to be the Messiah was to blaspheme, which it certainly was not; [218] and by assuming that the mob who had (on Schweitzer's view) acclaimed an Elias would be struck dumb with horror on being told that Elias claimed to be the Messiah. The secret of this psychosis is in Dr. Schweitzer's sole possession, as is the explanation of the total absence of his statement from all the literature produced by the generation which, on his assumption, knew all about the case. And this is what is left after a survey of the German exegesis "from Reimarus to Wrede." It is to be feared that neither the scholars nor the laity will accept either of Dr. Schweitzer's alternatives, and that the nature of his own prestidigitatory solution may tend somewhat to weaken the effect of his indictment of the kaleidoscopic process which has hitherto passed as a solution among the experts. Dr. Schweitzer seems to realize all absurdities save his own. None the less, he has done a critical service in arguing down all the rest, though even in his final verdict he exhibits symptoms of the "sacred disease," the theologian's malady of self-contradiction:--