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

The saying is not simply a miscellaneous comment on how prayer and faith can do such things as curse fig trees. It is a very specific word of judgment: the Temple mountain is, figuratively speaking, to be taken up and cast into the sea.

If, however, one wanted to define ‘neighbour’ more broadly, so as to include those outside the covenant, then did one not have to give up the idea of Torah, of a boundary around the covenant people, altogether? It is in this context that Luke’s introductory remark becomes very pregnant: he, desiring to justify himself. This is not the Pelagian

The point of having Jesus at the centre of a religion or a faith is that one has Jesus: not a cypher, a strange silhouetted Christfigure, nor yet an icon, but the one Jesus the New Testament writers know, the one born in Palestine in the reign of Augustus Caesar, and crucified outside Jerusalem in the reign of his successor Tiberius. Christianity

And yet this is in fact the stuff of which history is made. When we look for explanations of events in the world of human affairs, we are seeking for human motivations.

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

Crossan uses the phrase ‘world-negating’ along with this broader sense of ‘eschatological’, and (as we shall see presently) argues that Jesus belonged with a strictly non-apocalyptic sapiential ‘eschatology’.

The fact that Jesus effected only a brief cessation of sacrifice fits perfectly with the idea of a symbolic action. He was not attempting a reform; he was symbolizing judgment. We may remind ourselves of the horror with which Jews contemplated the cessation of the regular sacrifices.209 Jesus’ action symbolized his belief that, in returning to

We must beware, therefore, of limiting our study to the strict occurrences of the word ‘kingdom’ and its obvious cognates as they occur in dictionaries and concordances. Much relevant material would thereby be omitted.