Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God

Messiahs came in many shapes and sizes. It was by no means clear from anything in the culture of the time exactly how someone who believed himself to be the eschatological prophet, let alone YHWH’s anointed, ought to behave, what his programme should be, or how he should set about implementing it.

From the twentieth-century, late-deist, western-individual perception, it looks simply as if Jesus is behaving as ‘god’, dispensing forgiveness from a great metaphysical height. That gives a spurious perception of why such symbolic behaviour was shocking. In first-century Jewish reality, the way YHWH forgave sins, as we saw, was ultimately through

He had not come to rehabilitate the symbol of holy land, but to subsume it within a different fulfilment of the kingdom, which would embrace the whole creation—from which, of course, he drew continually in the narratives and imagery of his teaching and announcement.

Jesus’ overall perspective was that God was bringing an end to the demonic and political powers dominating his society so that a renewal of individual and social life would be possible … The language of the end refers not to the end of history or of creation but to the resolution of the historical crisis, and the main hope [in Daniel] is for the de

The battle was already joined, and it was the battle, not with Rome, but with the true accuser, the satan. Moreover, the battle was being waged successfully. But this could only be so—i.e. the exorcisms could only take effect—if, fourthly, a prior battle had already been won. Jesus was claiming that he had already met the prince of demons and defea

It indicates that, for Jesus, part of the point of the kingdom he was claiming to inaugurate would be that it would bring with it all that the Temple offered, thereby replacing, and making redundant, Israel’s greatest symbol.

If we understand Jesus’ action in the Temple in the way I have suggested, we achieve the very great historical benefit of coherence, at this point, between a good many words and deeds which were most characteristic of Jesus during his itinerant ministry, and the deeds and words which, in Jerusalem, brought that whole prophetic career to its climax.

When we add this element to the argument advanced above, it appears that there were very good reasons why Pharisees, and perhaps others, might take an unusually close interest in Jesus and his followers, to see if they could detect any tell-tale signs of the disloyalty they already suspected.

If, after all, he looked like leading a whole town astray, then Deuteronomy 13:12–18 would come into play; it has been suggested that this was why several towns refused to countenance his teaching, since to do so would court disaster for them as well as for him.