The same was true about Jesus’ claim to be able to provide forgiveness.250 This ‘forgiveness’ should not be thought of as a detached, ahistorical blessing, such as might be offered by anyone at any time.

This is not a piece of ‘teaching’ about ‘religion’ or ‘morality’; nor is it the dissemination of a timeless truth. It is a claim about eschatology. The time is fulfilled; the exile is over; the bridegroom is at hand. Jesus’ acted symbol, feasting rather than fasting, brings into public visibility his controversial claim, that in his work Israel’s

He rejects, rightly, any idea that what Jesus found amiss with Pharisaic teaching was ‘pettifogging legalism’. He offers, instead, a category which I would myself, in broad terms, endorse: Jesus was announcing ‘restoration eschatology’.

I am convinced that his final point is basically correct: where conflict occurred, it was because of Jesus’ eschatological beliefs and agenda, rather than because of a clash of abstract religious or moral values or teachings.

Even the great vision of the lion and the lamb lying down together continues with a state of affairs ‘in which justice still needs to be administered and the rights of the poor protected’.

Finally, it is similarly unlikely that all modern interpreters are totally wrong; we cannot simply discount serious debates and go back to the sources as though nothing of value had been said in the last hundred years or so.

what John was doing must be seen, and can only be seen, as a prophetic renewal movement within Judaism—a renewal, however, that aimed not at renewing the existing structures, but at replacing them.

There is still a soi-disant ‘orthodoxy’ that wishes to have nothing more to do with history, in view of the shame that it has brought on the family in the past.

Like any good Jew, he believes that if he faces this, in obedience to the divine plan, he will be vindicated. And the word for that is ‘resurrection’.