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

Some have seen ‘the one who can cast into Gehenna’ as YHWH; but this is unrealistic. Jesus did not, to be sure, perceive Israel’s god as a kindly liberal grandfather who would never hurt a fly, let alone send anyone to Gehenna.47 But again and again—not least in the very next verse of this paragraph—Israel’s god is portrayed as the creator and sust

What Jesus was offering, in other words, was not a different religious system. It was a new world order, the end of Israel’s long desolation, the true and final ‘forgiveness of sins’, the inauguration of the kingdom 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.

Furthermore, Jesus, by making this claim in this way, perceived himself to be not merely a prophet like Jeremiah, announcing the Temple’s doom, but the true king, who had the authority which both the Hasmoneans and Herod had thought to claim.180 In acting the way he did, ‘he conjured up the nation’s most compelling traditions at a moment when recei

They are more like a set of lenses, each of which needs careful individual cleaning, but all of which must eventually be held together in a line if the true picture is to be seen through them. As we do this, what we are looking at, in increasing detail, is the mindset of Jesus: his variation on Israel’s worldview, his subversion of rival interpreta

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 f

It does not help very much at all to take each saying, each parable, and work through a multiply hypothetical history of traditions as though aiming thereby to peel the historical onion back to its core. That is the way of tears and frustration, a new form of scholarly exile, reflected in the wild carob-pods of the prodigal, which, being…

Some highl

They were signs which were intended as, and would have been perceived as, the physical inauguration of the kingdom of Israel’s god, the putting into action of the welcome and the warning which were the central message of the kingdom and its redefinition.

But I do not think that Jesus’ action was motivated by his expectation that YHWH would shortly build a new Temple of bricks and mortar. I think that Jesus saw himself, and perhaps his followers with him, as the new Temple (see below, chapter 13).