With this end in view He leaves Galilee, when He judges the time to be ripe, in order to work on a larger scale. “In case of an unfavourable issue, He reckons on the influence which a martyr‐death has never failed to exercise in giving momentum to a lofty idea.” How far He had advanced, when He entered on the fateful journey to Jerusalem, in shaping His plan, and especially in organising the company of adherents who had gathered about Him, it is impossible to determine with any exactness. He permitted the triumphal entry because He did not desire to decline the role of the Messiah in every aspect of it. Owing to this arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptic Jesus, Strauss’s picture is in essence much more unhistorical than Renan’s. The latter had not needed to deny that Jesus had done miracles, and he had been able to suggest an explanation of how Jesus came in the end to fall back upon the eschatological system of ideas. But at what a price! By portraying Jesus as at variance with Himself, a hero broken in spirit. This price is too high for Strauss. Arbitrary as his treatment of history is, he never loses the intuitive feeling that in Jesus’ self‐consciousness there is a unique absence of struggle; that He does not bear the scars which are found in those natures which win their way to freedom and purity through strife and conflict, that in Him there is no trace of the hardness, harshness, and gloom which cleave to such natures throughout life, but that He “is manifestly a beautiful nature from the first.” Thus, for all Strauss’s awkward, arbitrary handling of the history he is greater than the rival(124) who could manufacture history with such skill. Nevertheless, from the point of view of theological science, this work marks a standstill. That was the net result of the thirty years of critical study of the life of Jesus for the man who had inaugurated it so impressively. This was the only fruit which followed those blossoms so full of promise of the first Life of Jesus.