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

With the mesocosmic level there can be no problem in principle; all agree that the serious task of historical reconstruction, applied to first-century Palestine, is the essential setting for any study of Jesus.

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?

It should be noted once more that the five questions fit together very closely, so that answers to any of them have repercussions elsewhere. It is comparatively easy to find an answer to one of them, but fitting it with answers to the rest is not. Together they form the jigsaw of Jesus himself, which is itself a piece in the larger jigsaw of the ri

works of power were a vital ingredient in the inauguration of the kingdom.194 As such, they might also be seen as the breaking in of the new order planned by the creator god.

Certain basic questions emerge: Jesus’ message is evaluated, not for its timeless significance, but for the meaning it must have had for the audience of his own day, who had their minds full of poverty and politics, and would have had little time for theological abstractions or timeless verities.

for Jesus to give his followers a special prayer, and to speak of them as a new community, a ‘little flock’.107 He explained what he was doing, as we shall see in more detail later, in terms of the reconstitution of Israel.108 This again echoes the work of John, who saw his disciples, we may certainly suppose, as the nucleus of the renewed people o

This explains, too, the cryptic saying about forgiveness which follows the Beelzebul controversy. The forgiveness of sins, Jesus insisted, was indeed coming, and sins of every kind could be forgiven when that happened; but if someone specifically denied the eschatological work of the spirit of YHWH, they were by that very act declaring themselves t

When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were.

This was the restored, redefined family. What is more, this family was in principle open to all, beyond the borders of Israel. Land and family were simultaneously rethought in the promise that the eschatological blessing would reach beyond the traditional confines.

The context and content of Daniel 9 thus point to a complex grid of meaning for Mark 13 and its parallels: YHWH’s final faithfulness to the covenant, and his rescue of his faithful ones, is to come about paradoxically through the destruction of the rebuilt city, and also through the cutting off of an abandoned ‘anointed one’. These, I suggest, are