In the end there is no such very great difference between Wendt and the writers who had advanced to the conviction of the irreconcilability of the two traditions. Wendt refuses to give up the Fourth Gospel altogether; they, on their part, won only a half victory because they did not as a matter of fact escape from the Johannine interpretation of the Synoptics. By means of their psychological interpretation of the first three Gospels they make for themselves an ideal Fourth Gospel, in the interests of which they reject the existing Fourth Gospel. They will hear nothing of the spiritualised Johannine Christ, and refuse to acknowledge even to themselves that they have only deposed Him in order to put in His place a spiritualised Synoptic Jesus Christ, that is, a man who claimed to be the Messiah, but in a spiritual sense. All the development which they discover in Jesus is in the last analysis only an evidence of the tension between the Synoptics, in their natural literal sense, and the “Fourth Gospel” which is extracted from them by an artificial interpretation. The fact is, the separation between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel is only the first step to a larger result which necessarily follows from it—the complete recognition of the fundamentally eschatological character of the teaching and influence of the Marcan and Matthaean Jesus. Inasmuch as they suppressed this consequence, Holtzmann, Schenkel, Hase, and Weizsäcker, even after their critical conversion, still lay under the spell of the Fourth Gospel, of a modern, ideal Fourth Gospel. It is only when the eschatological question is decided that the problem of the relation of John to the Synoptics is finally laid to rest. The liberal Lives of Jesus grasped their incompatibility only from a literary point of view, not in its full historical significance.