The new problem is as yet hardly recognised, much less grappled with. The few who since Weiss’s time have sought to pass over from the life of Jesus to early Christianity, have acted like men who find themselves on an ice‐ floe which is slowly dividing into two pieces, and who leap from one to the other before the cleft grows too wide. Harnack, in his “What is Christianity?” almost entirely ignores the contemporary limitations of Jesus’ teaching, and starts out with a Gospel which carries him down without difficulty to the year 1899. The anti‐historical violence of this procedure is, if possible, still more pronounced in Wernle. The “Beginnings of our Religion”(172) begins by putting the Jewish eschatology in a convenient posture for the coming operation by urging that the idea of the Messiah, since there was no appropriate place for it in connexion with the Kingdom of God or the new Earth, had become obsolete for the Jews themselves. The inadequateness of the Messianic idea for the purposes of Jesus is therefore self‐evident. “His whole life long”—as if we knew any more of it than the few months of His public ministry!—“He laboured to give a new and higher content to the Messianic title which He had adopted.” In the course of this endeavour He discarded “the Messiah of the Zealots”—by that is meant the political non‐transcendent Messianic ideal. As if we had any knowledge of the existence of such an ideal in the time of Jesus! The statements of Josephus suggest, and the conduct of Pilate at the trial of Jesus confirms the conclusion, that in none of the risings did a claimant of the Messiahship come forward, and this should be proof enough that there did not exist at that time a political eschatology alongside of the transcendental, and indeed it could not on inner grounds subsist alongside of it. That was, after all, the thing which Weiss had shown most clearly! Jesus, therefore, had dismissed the Messiah of the Zealots; He had now to turn Himself into the “waiting” Messiah of the Rabbis. Yet He does not altogether accept this rôle, for He works actively as Messiah. His struggle with the Messianic conception could not but end in transforming it. This transformed conception is introduced by Jesus to the people at His entry into Jerusalem, since His choice of the ass to bear Him inscribed as a motto, so to speak, over the demonstration the prophecy of the Messiah who should be a bringer of peace. A few days later He gives the Scribes to understand by His enigmatic words with reference to Mark xii. 37, that His Messiahship has nothing to do with Davidic descent and all that that implied. The Kingdom of God was not, of course, for Him, according to Wernle, a purely eschatological entity; He saw in many events evidence that it had already dawned. Wernle’s only real concession to the eschatological school is the admission that the Kingdom always remained for Jesus a supernatural entity.