EARLY WISDOM GOSPELS 35
Schweitzer's paragraph in his Quest of the Historical Jesus presents a powerful
image of the apocalyptic Jesus:
There is silence all around. The baptizer appears, and cries, "Re-
pent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Soon after that
comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that he is the coming son of
man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that
last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It
refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it. Then it does turn,
and crushes him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological con-
ditions, he has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the
mangled body of the one immeasurably great man, who was
strong enough to think of himself as the spiritual ruler of hu-
mankind and to bend history to his purpose, is hanging upon it
still. That is his victory and his reign.^5
That is his victory, that is his reign, that is the kingdom. Jesus was convinced
that the kingdom of god would come soon, but he was wrong, Schweitzer
claimed—heroically wrong, yet dead wrong.
Today many scholars are questioning whether Schweitzer and others were
right in proposing that Jesus was first and foremost an apocalyptic figure.
Schweitzer himself seems to have had second thoughts about Jesus as an apoc-
alypticist. During much of his life Schweitzer focused his attention upon the
sayings of Jesus—sayings of the Jewish sage—and in a later version of the pref-
ace to The Quest of the Historical Jesus Schweitzer suggests that Jesus' ethical
teachings may be more central to his message than the apocalyptic vision. As
scholars increasingly are reasoning, if the apocalyptic vision actually comes
from believers in the early church, then the supposed apocalyptic preoccupa-
tions of Jesus may have been placed upon him by his biographers. Jesus may
not have been a preacher of the apocalypse after all; he may have been a Jew-
ish teacher of wisdom, a teller of stories, a sage.
There is considerable evidence to support the interpretation of Jesus as a
Jewish sage. The New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all
contain a substantial amount of material reflecting Jesus' teachings and sayings.
Among the first three gospels (usually termed the synoptic gospels), Matthew
and Luke have more sayings and stories than Mark, and most scholars think- Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, pp. 370-71.