If Schenkel’s picture of Jesus’ character attracted much more attention than Weizsäcker’s work, that is mainly due to the art of lively popular presentation by which it is distinguished. The writer knows well how to keep the reader’s interest awake by the use of exciting headlines. Catchwords abound, and arrest the ear, for they are the catchwords about which the religious controversies of the time revolved. There is never far to look for the moral of the history, and the Jesus here portrayed can be imagined plunging into the midst of the debates in any ministerial conference. The moralising, it must be admitted, sometimes becomes the occasion of the feeblest ineptitudes. Jesus sent out His disciples two and two; this is for Schenkel a marvellous exhibition of wisdom. The Lord designed, thereby, to show that in His opinion “nothing is more inimical to the interests of the Kingdom of God than individualism, self‐will, self‐pleasing.” Schenkel entirely fails to recognise the superb irony of the saying that in this life all that a man gives up for the sake of the Kingdom of God is repaid a hundredfold in persecutions, in order that in the Coming Age he may receive eternal life as his reward. He interpreted it as meaning that the sufferer shall be compensated by love; his fellow‐ Christians will endeavour to make it up to him, and will offer him their own possessions so freely that, in consequence of this brotherly love, he will soon have, for the house which he has lost, a hundred houses, for the lost sisters, brothers, and so forth, a hundred sisters, a hundred brothers, a hundred fathers, a hundred mothers, a hundred farms. Schenkel forgets to add that, if this is to be the interpretation of the saying, the persecuted man must also receive through this compensating love, a hundred wives.(135) This want of insight into the largeness, the startling originality, the self‐contradictoriness, and the terrible irony in the thought of Jesus, is not a peculiarity of Schenkel’s; it is characteristic of all the liberal Lives of Jesus from Strauss’s down to Oskar Holtzmann’s.(136) How could it be otherwise? They had to transpose a way of envisaging the world which belonged to a hero and a dreamer to the plane of thought of a rational bourgeois religion. But in Schenkel’s representation, with its popular appeal, this banality is particularly obtrusive.