The chief excellence of Beyschlag’s Life of Jesus consists in its arrangement.(145) He first, in the volume of preliminary investigations, discusses the problems, so that the narrative is disencumbered of all explanations, and by virtue of the author’s admirable style becomes a pure work of art, which rivets the interest of the reader and almost causes the want of a consistent historical conception to be overlooked. The fact is, however, that in regard to the two decisive questions Beyschlag is deliberately inconsistent. Although he recognises that the Gospel of John has not the character of an essentially historical source, “being, rather, a brilliant subjective portrait,” “a didactic, quite as much as an historical work,” he produces his Life of Jesus by “combining and mortising together Synoptic and Johannine elements.” The same uncertainty prevails in regard to the recognition of the definitely eschatological character of Jesus’ system of ideas. Beyschlag gives a very large place to eschatology, so that in order to combine the spiritual with the eschatological view his Jesus has to pass through three stages of development. In the first He preaches the Kingdom as something future, a supernatural event which was to be looked forward to, much as the Baptist preached it. Then the response which was called forth on all hands by His preaching led Him to believe that the Kingdom was in some sense already present, “that the Father, while He delays the outward manifestation of the Kingdom, is causing it to come even now in quiet and unnoticed ways by a humble gradual growth, and the great thought of His parables, which dominates the whole middle period of His public life, the resemblance of the Kingdom to mustard seed or leaven, comes to birth in His mind.” As His failure becomes more and more certain, “the centre of gravity of His thought is shifted to the world beyond the grave, and the picture of a glorious return to conquer and to judge the world rises before Him.” The peculiar interweaving of Synoptic and Johannine ideas leads to the result that, between the two, Beyschlag in the end forms no clear conception of the eschatology, and makes Jesus think in a half‐Johannine, half‐Synoptic fashion. “It is a consequence of Jesus’ profound conception of the Kingdom of God as something essentially growing that He regards its final perfection not as a state of rest, but rather as a living movement, as a process of becoming, and since He regards this process as a cosmic and supernatural process in which history finds its consummation, and yet as arising entirely out of the ethical and historical process, He combines elements from each into the same prophetic conception.” An eschatology of this kind is not matter for history.