And yet the outcome of this attempt of Weiffenbach’s, which begins with so much real promise, is in the end wholly unsatisfactory. The “authentic thought of the return” which he takes as his standard has for its sole content the expectation of a visible personal return in the near future “free from all more or less fantastic apocalyptic and Jewish‐Christian speculations about the future.” That is to say, the whole of the eschatological discourses of Jesus are to be judged by the standard of a colourless, unreal figment of theology. Whatever cannot be squared with that is to be declared spurious and cut away! Accordingly the eschatological closing saying at the Last Supper is stigmatised as a “Chiliastic‐Capernaitic”(157) distortion of a “normal” promise of the Second Coming; the idea of the παλιγγενεσία, Matt. xix. 28, is said to be wholly foreign to Jesus’ world of thought; it is impossible, too, that Jesus can have thought of Himself as the Judge of the world, for the Jewish and Jewish‐Christian eschatology does not ascribe the conduct of the Last Judgment to the Messiah; that is first done by Gentile Christians, and especially by Paul. It was, therefore, the later eschatology which set the Son of Man on the throne of His glory and prepared “the twelve thrones of judgment for the disciples.” The historian ought only to admit such of the sayings about bearing rule in the Messianic Kingdom as can be interpreted in a spiritual, non‐sensuous fashion. In the end Weiffenbach’s critical principle proves to be merely a bludgeon with which he goes seal‐hunting and clubs the defenceless Synoptic sayings right and left. When his work is done you see before you a desert island strewn with quivering corpses. Nevertheless the slaughter was not aimless, or at least it was not without result. In the first place, it did really appear, as a by‐product of the critical processes, that Jesus’ discourses about the future had nothing to do with an historical prevision of the destruction of Jerusalem, whereas the supposition that they had, had hitherto been taken as self‐evident, the prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem being regarded as the historic nucleus of Jesus’ discourses regarding the future, to which the idea of the Last Judgment had subsequently attached itself. Here, then, we have the introduction of the converse opinion, which was subsequently established as correct; namely, that Jesus foresaw, indeed, the Last Judgment, but not the historical destruction of Jerusalem.