Now with reference to his death Jesus had spoken also of atonement and forgiveness of sins. But the thoughts which he associated therewith the events had rendered entirely impossible. The indefinite “many,” who were to apply the ransom to themselves in the knowledge that he had suffered for them, simply did not exist; for the Kingdom had not yet appeared. Only from that point of vantage, however, could one apprehend that he had performed the Atonement of Affliction for the inheritors of the Kingdom. In the meantime the situation was entirely different: “the believers” had taken the place of the “many.” Those who believe in the messiahship of Jesus have the forgiveness of sins,—this sentence, as the sermon at Pentecost shows, was a constituent of the earlier Apostolic preaching (Acts 2:38). But to what extent one had thereby forgiveness of sins,—in that consisted the problem. This, however, was historically insoluble, for according to Jesus’ secret of the Passion [pg 244] the forgiveness of sins applied not to those who believe in Jesus-Christ, but to the inheritors of the Kingdom. Therefore, however profound they may be, and however true to the religious consciousness of their time, none of the attempts to explain the significance of the Passion, from Paul to Ritschl, apprehend the thought of Jesus, because they proceed upon an entirely different assumption. As all of these theories sought nevertheless to legitimate themselves historically, we witness the astonishing spectacle, that the most diverse interpretations of his Passion are put into the mouth of Jesus,—of which, however, not one can even remotely explain how out of such a conception the primitive Apostolic estimate of the Death could have been derived. The same is true of the modern-historical solution. If Jesus taught the Disciples to understand the ethical significance of his death, why did the primitive Christian explanation of the Passion confine itself to the notion of conformity with Scripture and the “forgiveness of sins”? To this question the modern-historical solution furnishes no answer. The eschatologico-historical, on the other hand, is able to take account perspectively of the necessary distortion which Jesus’ idea of the Passion [pg 245] underwent in the primitive Church. It indicates which elements alone of the Passion secret could still subsist after his death. Because it grasps the connection between the early Christian interpretation and the thought of Jesus the eschatologico-historical solution is the right one.