Six days later he goes with the Three to the mountain where he had prayed alone. There he is revealed to them as the Messiah. On the way home he forbade them to say anything about it until at the Resurrection he should be revealed in the glory of the Son of Man. They, however, still remark the failure of Elijah to appear, who yet must come before the Resurrection of the dead can take place. They were not present at the eulogy over the Baptist to hear the mysterious intimation he let fall. He must therefore make it clear to them now that the beheaded prisoner was Elijah. They should take no offence at his fate, for it was so ordained. He also who [pg 264] is to be Son of Man must suffer many things and be set at naught. So the Scripture will have it. The Kingdom which Jesus expected so very soon failed to make its appearance. This first eschatological delay and postponement was momentous for the fate of the Gospel tradition, inasmuch as now all the events related to the mission of the Twelve became unintelligible, because all consciousness was lost of the fact that the most intense eschatological expectation then inspired Jesus and his following. Hence it is that precisely this period is confused and obscure in the accounts, and all the more so because several incidents remained enigmatical to those even who had a part in the experience. Thus the sacramental Supper by the seashore became in the tradition a “miraculous feeding,” in a sense totally different from that which Jesus had in mind. Therewith, too, the motives of Jesus’ disappearance became unintelligible. It seems to be a case of flight, while on the other hand the accounts give no hint how matters had come to such a pass. The key to the historical understanding of the life of Jesus lies in the perception of the two corresponding points at which the eschatological expectation [pg 265] culminated. During the days at Jerusalem there was a return of the enthusiasm which had already showed itself in the days at Bethsaida. Without this assumption we are left with a yawning gap in the Gospel tradition between the mission of the Twelve and the journey to Jerusalem. Historians find themselves compelled to _invent_ a period of Galilean defeat in order to establish some connection between the recorded facts,—as if a section were missing in our Gospels. _That is the weak point of all the “lives of Jesus.”_ By his retreat into the region of the Genesareth Jesus withdrew himself from the Pharisees and the people in order to be alone with his Disciples, as he had in vain tried to do since their return from their mission. He urgently needed such a retreat, for he had to come to an understanding about two messianic facts. Why is the Baptist executed by the secular authority before the messianic time has dawned? Why does the Kingdom fail to appear notwithstanding that the tokens of its dawning are present?