tion, and reign for four hundred years. He
and all mankind would then die. The world would come to an end and be
restored to primaeval silence. Then would follow the Resurrection and
Judgement, and the beginning of the Age to Come. All the features of
both systems are thus combined, except that it appears that the
Judgement is the act of God himself, rather than of an especially
appointed representative.

The general result of reading the literature belonging to this period
is to create the impression that recent scholarship has gone much
further than is {23} justifiable in the attempt to systematise Jewish
thought on eschatology. It has succumbed too readily to the temptation
to find system where there is none, to base a chronological development
of thought on the discovery, and finally to emend the texts in its
light, and sometimes in its aid. It seems extremely doubtful whether
there was any "generally recognised" Jewish teaching on this subject.
The belief that God would deliver his people, and that his sovereignty
would be recognised throughout the world, was no doubt part of the
belief of every pious Jew, but the details were vague and there was no
systematic teaching on them.

If we turn to the gospels we find that the Kingdom of God is sometimes
looked for in the future, sometimes regarded as a present reality.
Scholarship in the last fifteen years has passed through a period in
which the presence of these two elements has been somewhat hotly
debated. The beginning of the discussion was probably the publication
of Johannes Weiss' monograph[11] on the preaching of Jesus as to the
Kingdom of God, in which he emphasised the future aspect of the
Kingdom. The question was, however, presented with greater perspective
as to its position in the history of criticism by A. Schweitzer in a
book which he called _Von Reimarus zu Wrede_. This was translated into
English,[12] a fate denied to Weiss, with the result that in England
and America the whole {24} problem was associated with Schweitzer's
name. The position adopted by these writers was that the teaching of
Jesus was mainly eschatological, that is to say, it looked forward to
the coming of the end of the world. In the enthusiasm of the
rediscovery of this point of view--by no means unknown to our
ancestors, and universal in the early Church--Schweitzer and others
went rather further than the evidence permitted, and endeavoured to
explain eschatologically p