578 NEW TESTAMENT 



teaching. R. H. Charles's editions of the apocalyptic and pseudepi- 

 graphic writings, and Kautzsch's translations are compelling us to 

 see something more of Judaism than what its official defenders hold 

 up for us to see in the Talmud and the officially delimited canon. 

 The ideal of the religious purists, attained after all disturbers of the 

 peace had been cast out, was by no means the actuality of the earlier 

 time. My colleague at Yale, Professor F. C. Porter, once pointed out 

 that the attitude of the prophets toward the Messianic hope of their 

 time is not that of introducing a new truth. They merely criticise 

 and refine an accepted popular expectation. In the period of apo- 

 calypse this popular hope appears with further accretions from the 

 crude mythology of popular syncretism, whose Gentile affinities 

 have been shown by Brandt, Gunkel, and Bousset. The rabbinic 

 censors of Jamnia and Tiberias made easier work of the later apo- 

 calyptic literature by excluding it from the canon altogether. But 

 the Gospels move in an atmosphere saturated with the 'apocalyptic 

 ideas of the post-canonical literature, and even Paul, the critical 

 Rabbi, rejoices in his "visions and revelations of the Lord." 

 Apocalypse is the very root of his religious life, his cosmology is 

 reflective. 



The teaching of Jesus presupposes a religious life and thought 

 already affected to the core by the antithesis of a present and future 

 world, and by a morbid supernaturalism into which he infuses the 

 antidote of a simple and teachable faith, seeing God in things as they 

 are. 



So it comes that the portrait of contemporary Judaism requires to 

 be repainted, as well as that of Hellenism. The Petrine gospel, too, 

 has a far broader substructure than mere Old Testament religion. The 

 transition from the prophets to the period of the New Testament is 

 a transition to a world imbued with a sense of race-unity, conscious 

 of a world-order under a single supreme Being, aspiring to individual 

 immortality. The mere change from national supremacy to individual 

 life in the world to come as the goal of religious hope is revolutionary. 

 If, then, Pauline Christianity is but half intelligible without the Book 

 of Wisdom and II Esdras, what can we make of Petrine without the 

 literature which rabbinic Judaism repudiated when it cast off the 

 Minim and all their works? We have need that Baldensperger 

 rewrite his Messianisches Selbstbeumsstsein Jesu, devoting a full 

 volume to Die Messianischapokalyptischen Hoffnungen des Juden- 

 thums, that Charles should give us his Critical History of the Doctrine 

 of a Future Life in Israel (1899), and Volz his Judische Eschatologie. 

 Our understanding of Petrinism required all the researches of Well- 

 hausen, Lietzmann, and our own Nathaniel Schmidt, on the origin 

 and significance of the title Son of Man. But these were partial con- 

 tributions. The comprehensive need was that the great work of 



