Again, is the saying about the gluttonous man and wine‐bibber a sufficient basis for the contrast between Jesus and the Baptist? Is not Jesus’ preaching of repentance gloomy as well as the Baptist’s? Where do we read that He, in contrast with the Baptist, avoided dealing with masses of men? Where did He give “the community of His disciples” marching orders to go far and wide in the sense required by Bousset’s argument? Where is there a word to tell us that He thought of His work among individuals and little groups of men as the most important feature of His ministry? Are we not told the exact contrary, that He “taught” His disciples as little as He did the people? Is there any justification for characterising the missionary journey of the Twelve, just because it directly contradicts this view, as “an obscure and unintelligible tradition?” Is it so certain that Jesus made a Messianic entry into Jerusalem, and that, accordingly, He declared Himself to the disciples and to the High Priest as Messiah in the present, and not in a purely future sense? What are the sayings which justify us in making the attitude of opposition which He took up towards the Rabbinic legalism into a “sense of the absolute opposition between Himself and His people”? The very “absolute,” with its ring of Schleiermacher, is suspicious. All these, however, are subsidiary positions. The decisive point is: Can Bousset make good the assertion that Jesus’ joy in life was a more or less unconscious inner protest against the purely eschatological world‐ renouncing religious attitude, the primal expression of that “absolute” antithesis to Judaism? Is it not the case that His attitude towards earthly goods was wholly conditioned by eschatology? That is to say, were not earthly goods emptied of any essential value in such a way that joy in the world and indifference to the world were simply the final expression of an ironic attitude which had been sublimated into pure serenity. That is the question upon the answer to which depends the decision whether Bousset’s position is tenable or not.