In the first instance Bousset is as ready as Johannes Weiss to admit the importance for the mind of Jesus of the eschatological “then” and “now.” The realistic school, he thinks, are perfectly right in endeavouring to relate Jesus, without apologetic or theological inconsistencies, to the background of contemporary ideas. Later, in 1901, he was to make it a reproach against Harnack’s “What is Christianity?” (_Das Wesen des Christentums_) that it did not give sufficient importance to the background of contemporary thought in its account of the preaching of Jesus.(164) He goes on to ask, however, whether the first enthusiasm over the discovery of this genuinely historical way of looking at things should not be followed by some “second thoughts” of a deeper character. Accepting the position laid down by Johannes Weiss, we must ask, he thinks, whether this purely historical criticism, by the exclusive emphasis which it has laid upon eschatology, has not allowed the “essential originality and power of the personality of Jesus to slip through its fingers,” and closed its grasp instead upon contemporary conceptions and imaginations which are often of a quite special character. The Late‐Jewish eschatology was, according to Bousset, by no means a homogeneous system of thought. Realistic and transcendental elements stand side by side in it, unreconciled. The genuine popular belief of Late Judaism still clung quite naively to the earthly realistic hopes of former times, and had never been able to rise to the purely transcendental regions which are the characteristic habitat of apocalyptic. The rejection of the world is never carried out consistently; something of the Jewish national ideal always remains. And for this reason Late Judaism made no progress towards the overcoming of particularism. Probably, Bousset holds, this Apocalyptic thought is not even genuinely Jewish; as he ably argued in another work, there was a considerable strain of Persian influence in it.(165) The dualism, the transference to the transcendental region of the future hope, the conception of the world which appears in Jewish apocalyptic, are of Iranian rather than Jewish origin. Two thoughts are especially characteristic of Bousset’s position; first, that this transcendentalising of the future implied a spiritualisation of it; secondly, that in post‐exilic Judaism there was always an undercurrent of a purer and more spontaneous piety, the presence of which is especially to be traced in the Psalms.