On the one hand it is indeed certain that the early Church had a significant influence upon the representation of the public activity of Jesus. But on the other hand we have again in the very nature of the early Christian faith justification for the presumption that the Church did not alter the main lines of the account, and above all that it did not “fabricate facts” in the life of Jesus. For in fact the early Church maintained an attitude of indifference towards the life of Jesus as such! [pg 009] The early Christian faith had not the least interest in this earthly life, because the messiahship of Jesus was grounded upon his resurrection, not upon his earthly ministry, and the disciples looking forward expectantly to the coming of the Messiah in glory were interested in the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth only in so far as it served to illustrate his sayings. There was absolutely no such thing as an early Christian conception of the life of Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels contain nothing of the sort. They string together the narratives of the events of his public ministry without trying to make them intelligible in their sequence and connection, or to enable us to perceive the “development” of Jesus. Then in the course of time, as the eschatological expectation waned, as the emphasis upon the earthly appearing of Jesus as the Messiah began to preponderate, and thus led to a particular view (a theory) of the life of Jesus, the accounts of his public ministry had already assumed so fixed a form that they could not be affected by this process. The Fourth Gospel furnishes a historical picture of the life of Jesus, but it stands in much the same relation to the Synoptic account of the public ministry of Jesus as does Chronicles to the books of Samuel and Kings. The [pg 010] difference between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics consists precisely in the fact that the former furnishes a “life of Jesus” whereas the Synoptics give an account of his public ministry. The faith of the early Church influenced by immanent laws the mode in which the public ministry of Jesus was represented, just as the Deuteronomic reform affected men’s conception of the course of events during the period of the judges and the Kings. It was a case of inevitable and unconscious shifting of the perspective. The new view here presented takes due account of this shifting of the perspective, and from this reckoning it results that the influence which the belief of the early Christian community exerted upon the Synoptical accounts does not go nearly so deep as we have hitherto been inclined to suppose. _Strassburg, August, 1901._ [pg 011] Contents