Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being

Miracles! That’s the thing, said the apologists. Jesus did miracles, so that proves he’s the divine Son of God. For many people today, the question is still framed in the old eighteenth-century way, and they feel themselves obliged to give the same eighteenth-century answers. But this is a mistake.

Or he’s a wild-eyed apocalyptic visionary, expecting the end of the world.

the possibility, which the gospels were strenuously proposing, that in Jesus the God of Israel, the creator God, really did confound the Epicureans and everybody else as well by becoming king on earth as in heaven. Theocracy—but theocracy of a radically different kind from anything anyone had imagined for a very long time—was the name of the game.

the kingdom and the cross are part of one another

Nor was Israel created as a kind of worldly superpower (though it may have looked like that in the time of David and Solomon), a new nation that would beat the world at its own game. Rather—and this is something the early Christians come to with hindsight, only at that stage tracing its earlier stages in the Psalms and prophets—the point is that

But Jesus is talking about God becoming king in order to explain the things he himself is doing. He isn’t pointing away from himself to God. He is pointing to God in order to explain his own actions.

But there is no sense that this “age to come” is “eternal” in the sense of being outside space, time, and matter. Far from it.

The ancient Jews were creational monotheists. For them, God’s great future purpose was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay.