The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

double claim which the truth of history on the one hand, and the church on the other, are justified in presenting. The most brilliant part of Keim’s work is his delineation of the religious personality of Jesus,—how in it were combined, in a unique degree, strength and harmony, complete openness towards the world, with perfect inwardness towards God, so as to become the source of a new religion, in which self-surrender and liberty, humility and energy, enthusiasm and lucidity, are blended, and the chasm of previous ages between God and man filled up. His description of the psychological development of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus out of inward experiences and outward impressions and impulses, is also drawn with great delicacy of touch; at all events, it is an able and suggestive effort to penetrate, as far as the state of the sources admits, by means of sympathetic and reproductive divination, to the personal experiences and mental states of the religious genius from whom a new epoch in the world’s religious history proceeded. Still, as in the kindred efforts of Renan, Weizsäcker, Beyschlag and Weiss, we may never forget how much, with the poverty of the ascertained historical materials, is left to the uncontrolled power of combination and divination; in other words, to the imagination, which at best can do no more than roughly and approximately arrive at the truth, while it may no less easily go far astray. It is certainly to be deemed an advance that in the more recent works on the life of Jesus the subject of main interest is not so much the external miracles as the internal, the problems of the peculiar nature and development of his religious consciousness and character, his view of his vocation, his attitude towards