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

Mark 13 and its parallels drew together the strands of previous Temple-warnings, and that it solemnly predicted, in language drawn not least from Jeremiah and Daniel, that the Temple would be destroyed by foreign armies, and that this event should be seen as the outpouring of YHWH’s wrath upon his recalcitrant people. The last state of the house wo

The point was subtler, and more directly related to the actual agenda behind the lawyer’s question. What he was really interested in was where the covenant boundary-line had to be drawn. Jesus’ question at the end of the story was not simply, how then should you behave towards those you normally despise? It was sharper: which of the three turned ou

We must instead accept at face value what the Jewish sources themselves say: these laws, with all their detail and specificity, formed the boundary fence around the people of Israel, the nation of the Jews.

The reverent periphrasis ‘kingdom of heaven’, so long misunderstood by some Christians to mean ‘a place, namely heaven, where saved souls go to live after death’, meant nothing of the sort in Jesus’ world: it was simply a Jewish way of talking about Israel’s god becoming king.

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.

First, what are we talking about in discussing first-century Jewish hopes? It has commonly been assumed, at least since Weiss and Schweitzer, that Jesus and many of his contemporaries expected the imminent end of the present space-time order altogether, the winding up of history and the ushering in of a new age in radical discontinuity with the pre

‘Repentance’ in Jesus’ context, then, would have carried the connotations of ‘what Israel must do if YHWH is to restore her fortunes at last’.

The second explains the controversies, though not the crucifixion, at the expense of most of the evidence about first-century Jews. At the historical level, nobody doubts that Jesus was crucified, but a good many doubt that he entered into controversy with the Pharisees in particular. How are we to proceed?

So far, we have seen that Jesus’ kingdom-announcement, made in praxis and story, was stating a double positive claim, and a single negative one. Positively, he claimed that Israel was now at last experiencing the real return from exile, and (as we shall see) that YHWH was now at last returning to Zion. Negatively, he claimed (just as, we may stress