for the moment we may simply note that the question of abstract moralism, in which human beings try from scratch to make themselves good enough for acceptance with god, or to earn his favour, is not something that would have been particularly familiar to Paul, Jesus, or their hearers. For a Jew, the context of behaviour was of course the

So different was it, after all, that the early Christians sometimes had to argue to the authorities, against apparent appearances, that they were in some sense or other a ‘religious’ organization. It was perhaps almost as much their socio-cultural oddness as their denial of the pagan deities that earned them the title ‘atheists’. There were no

This book will aim to avoid such a prima facie weakness (the reverse, more or less, of Bultmann’s), and to demonstrate, at least preliminarily, the continuity, as well as the clear discontinuities, between Jesus and the early church.

it was assumed that talk of the ‘kingdom of god’, or of the ‘son of man coming on the clouds of heaven’, was to be taken as a literal prediction of events, shortly to take place, which would close the space-time order. But not only is it unnecessary to read apocalyptic language in this way: it is actually necessary, as historians, that we refuse to

membership. Jesus’ exchange with this one young man thus contained several central aspects of his kingdom-story, which is no doubt why the synoptic evangelists all give it such prominence. It focused on to one particular person and incident three features: the implied eschatology (the age to come/‘eternal life’), the place of Torah (fulfilled

We have got over the old idea that law-keeping was an early form of Pelagianism, by which Pharisees and others sought to earn their justification or salvation by moral effort. Sanders has expended a good deal of effort in demonstrating that such a picture is thoroughly false to first-century sources, and, though this notion will no doubt reappear

(1) Jesus fits believably into first-century Judaism, retelling its stories in new but thoroughly comprehensible ways. He speaks and acts, and is perceived to be speaking and acting, prophetically, challenging his hearers to recognize that in him the new thing for which they have longed is, however paradoxically, coming to pass. (2) He believes

Jesus’ summons to follow a new way of being Israel comes to a climax, as far as the synoptics are concerned, with the story of a rich young man. He came with a question: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ This was, of course, the question of the kingdom: what must I do to have a share in the age to come, to be among those who are vindicated

Worldviews may be studied in terms of four features: characteristic stories; fundamental symbols; habitual praxis; and a set of questions and answers (who are we? where are we? what’s wrong? what’s the solution? and what time is it?41).