How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.”

For Mark, all the signs are that he was thinking, as many other early Christians were in his day, of the term “God’s son” as having at least four meanings.

There is, in other words, a clear line all the way from Genesis 11, via Isaiah 40–55 and Daniel 7, to Mark 10, and thereby in turn to Mark 14–15, where Jesus meets his captors, his judges, and his death. He not only theorizes about the difference between pagan power and the kind of power he is claiming; he enacts it.

dethroning of the world’s kingdoms, not in order to replace them with another one of basically the same sort (one that makes its way through superior force of arms), but in order to replace it with one whose power is the power of the servant and whose strength is the strength of love.

This is an eschatological message, not in the trivial sense that it heralds the “end of the world” (whatever that might mean), but in the sense that it is about something that was supposed to happen when Israel’s hopes were fulfilled; and Israel’s hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God’s glory.

And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn’t allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world hi

His Jesus is a combination of the living Word of the Old Testament, the Shekinah of Jewish hope (God’s tabernacling presence in the Temple), and “wisdom,” which in some key Jewish writings was the personal self-expression of the creator God, coming to dwell with humans and particularly with Israel (see Wis. 7; Sir. 24).

They have grown tired of waiting for the “son of man” to be vindicated and will cut a deal with the fourth monster. They have glimpsed the servant vocation held out to Israel and are content to accept the rule of Babylon. Jesus came to his own, and his own didn’t want to know him. “If you let this fellow go,” they say, “you are no friend of Caesar”

Thus the speaker has been turned up so loud—“YES! THERE IS A GOD! YES! JESUS IS GOD!”—that the much more subtle and interesting point the gospels are making has all but been drowned out,