_Erich Haupt._ Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien. (The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.) 1895. 167 pp. _Paul Wernle._ Die Anfänge unserer Religion. Tübingen‐Leipzig, 1901; 2nd ed., 1904, 410 pp. _Emil Schürer._ Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu‐Christi. 1903. Akademische Festrede. (The Messianic Self‐consciousness of Jesus Christ.) 24 pp. _Wilhelm Brandt._ Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des Christentums auf Grund einer Kritik der Berichte über das Leiden und die Auferstehung Jesu. (The Gospel History and the Origin of Christianity. Based upon a Critical Study of the Narratives of the Sufferings and Resurrection of Jesus.) Leipzig, 1893. 591 pp. _Adolf Jülicher._ Die Gleichnisreden Jesu. (The Parables of Jesus.) Vol. i., 1888, 291 pp.; vol. ii., 1899, 643 pp. In this period the important books are short. The sixty‐seven pages of Johannes Weiss are answered by Bousset(163) in a bare hundred and thirty. People began to see that the elaborate Lives of Jesus which had hitherto held the field, and enjoyed an immortality of revised editions, only masked the fact that the study of the subject was at a standstill; and that the tedious re‐handling of problems which had been solved so far as they were capable of solution only served as an excuse for not grappling with those which still remained unsolved. This conviction is expressed by Bousset at the beginning of his work. The criticism of the sources, he says, is finished, and its results may be regarded, so far as the Life of Jesus is concerned, as provisionally complete. The separation between John and the Synoptists has been secured. For the Synoptists, the two‐document hypothesis has been established, according to which the sources are a primitive form of Mark, and a collection of “logia.” A certain interest might still attach to the attempt to arrive at the primitive kernel of Mark; but the attempt has a priori so little prospect of success that it was almost a waste of time to continue to work at it. It would be a much more important thing to get rid of the feeling of uncertainty and artificiality in the Lives of Jesus. What is now chiefly wanted, Bousset thinks, is “a firmly‐drawn and life‐ like portrait which, with a few bold strokes, should bring out clearly the originality, the force, the personality of Jesus.” It is evident that the centre of the problem has now been reached. That is why the writing becomes so terse. The masses of thought can only be manœuvred here in a close formation such as Weiss gives them. The loose order of discursive exegetical discussions of separate passages is now no longer in place. The first step towards further progress was the simple one of marshalling the passages in such a way as to gain a single consistent impression from them.