The ministry of Jesus is therefore not in principle different from that of John the Baptist: there can be no question of a founding and development of the Kingdom within the hearts of men. What distinguishes the work of Jesus from that of the Baptist is only His consciousness of being the Messiah. He awoke to this consciousness at His baptism. But the Messiahship which He claims is not a present office; its exercise belongs to the future. On earth He is only a man, a prophet, as in the view implied in the speeches in the Acts of the Apostles. “Son of Man” is therefore, in the passages where it is authentic, a purely eschatological designation of the Messiah, though we cannot tell whether His hearers understood Him as speaking of Himself in His future rank and dignity, or whether they thought of the Son of Man as a being quite distinct from Himself, whose coming He was only proclaiming in advance. “The sole object of this argument is to prove that the Messianic self‐ consciousness of Jesus, as expressed in the title ‘Son of Man,’ shares in the transcendental apocalyptic character of Jesus’ idea of the Kingdom of God, and cannot be separated from that idea.” The only partially correct evaluation of the factors in the problem of the Life of Jesus which Baldensperger had taken over from contemporary theology, and which had hitherto prevented historical science from obtaining a solution of that problem, had now been corrected from the history itself, and it was now only necessary to insert the corrected data into the calculation. Here is the point at which it is fitting to recall Reimarus. He was the first, and indeed, before Johannes Weiss, the only writer who recognised and pointed out that the preaching of Jesus was purely eschatological. It is true that his conception of the eschatology was primitive, and that he applied it not as a constructive, but as a destructive principle of criticism. But read his statement of the problem “with the signs changed,” and with the necessary deduction for the primitive character of the eschatology, and you have the view of Weiss. Ghillany, too, has a claim to be remembered. When Weiss asserts that the part played by Jesus was not the active rôle of establishing the Kingdom, but the passive rôle of waiting for the coming of the Kingdom; and that it was, in a sense, only by the acceptance of His sufferings that He emerged from that passivity; he is only asserting what Ghillany had maintained thirty years before with the same arguments and with the same decisiveness. But Weiss places the assertion on a scientifically unassailable basis. XVI. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ESCHATOLOGY _Wilhelm Bousset._ Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum. Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich. (The Antithesis between Jesus’ Preaching and Judaism. A Religious‐Historical Comparison.) Göttingen, 1892. 130 pp.