But there is no position so desperate that theology cannot find a way out of it. The mediating theologians simply ignored the problem which Strauss had raised. As they had been accustomed to do before, so they continued to do after, taking the Gospel of John as the authentic framework, and fitting into it the sections of the Synoptic narrative wherever place could best be found for them. The difference between the Johannine and Synoptic representations of Jesus’ method of teaching, says Neander, is only apparently irreconcilable, and he calls out in support of this assertion all the reserves of old worn‐out expedients and artifices, among others the argument that the Pauline Christology is only explicable as a combination of the Synoptic and Johannine views. Other writers who belong to the same apologetic school, such as Tholuck, Ebrard,(73) Wieseler,(74) Lange,(75) and Ewald,(76) maintain the same point of view, only that their defence is usually much less skilful. The only writer who really in some measure enters into the difficulties is Ammon. He, indeed, is fully conscious of the difference, and thinks we cannot rest content with merely recognising it, but must find a solution, even if rather a forced one, “by subordinating the indefinite chronological data of the Synoptists, of whom, after all, only one was, or could have been, an eyewitness, to the ordered narrative of John.” The fourth Evangelist makes so brief a reference to the Galilaean period because it was in accordance with his plan to give more prominence to the discourses of Jesus in the Temple and His dialogues with the Scribes as compared to the parables and teaching given to the people. The cleansing of the Temple falls at the outset of Jesus’ ministry; Jesus begins His Messianic work in Jerusalem by this action of making an end of the unseemly chaffering in the court of the Temple. The question regarding the relative authenticity of the reports is decisively settled by a comparison of the two accounts of the triumphal entry, because there it is quite evident that “Matthew, the chief authority among the Synoptists, adapts his narrative to his special Jewish‐Messianic standpoint.” According to Ammon’s rationalistic view, the work of Jesus consisted precisely in the transformation of this Jewish‐Messianic idea into the conception of a “Saviour of the world.” In this lies the explanation of the fate of Jesus: “The mass of the Jewish people were not prepared to receive a Christ so spiritual as Jesus was, since they were not ripe for so lofty a view of religion.”