ying them. But how unfit are they of themselves, after
1800 years, to secure any special importance to him to whom they are
attributed, unless that importance was already established apart from
them. That he could do with himself what he would, that he created a new
thing without overturning the old, that he won men to himself by
announcing the Father, that he inspired without fanaticism, set up a
kingdom without politics, set men free from the world without
asceticism, was a teacher without theology, at a time of fanaticism and
politics, asceticism and theology, is the great miracle of his person,
and that he who preached the Sermon on the Mount declared himself in
respect of his life and death, to be the Redeemer and Judge of the
world, is the offence and foolishness which mock all reason.]

[Footnote 68: See Mark X. 45.--That Jesus at the celebration of the
first Lord's supper described his death as a sacrifice which he should
offer for the forgiveness of sin, is clear from the account of Paul.
From that account it appears to be certain, that Jesus gave expression
to the idea of the necessity and saving significance of his death for
the forgiveness of sins, in a symbolical ordinance (based on the
conclusion of the covenant, Exod. XXIV. 3 ff., perhaps, as Paul
presupposes, on the Passover), in order that His disciples by repeating
it in accordance with the will of Jesus, might be the more deeply
impressed by it. Certain observations based on John VI., on the supper
prayer in the Didache, nay, even on the report of Mark, and supported at
the same time by features of the earliest practice in which it had the
character of a real meal, and the earliest theory of the supper, which
viewed it as a communication of eternal life and an anticipation of the
future existence, have for years made me doubt very much whether the
Pauline account and the Pauline conception of it, were really either the
oldest, or the universal and therefore only one. I have been
strengthened in this suspicion by the profound and remarkable
investigation of Spitta (z. Gesch. u. Litt. d. Urchristenthums: Die
urchristl. Traditionen ue. den Urspr. u. Sinnd. Abendmahls, 1893). He
sees in the supper as not instituted, but celebrated by Jesus, the
festival of the Messianic meal, the anticipated triumph over death, the
expression of the perfection of the Messianic work, the symbolic
representation of the filling of believers with the powers of the
Messianic k