He has come seeking fruit, and, finding none, he is announcing the Temple’s doom. The fig tree action is therefore an acted parable of an acted parable. This is now regularly noted by scholars.197 But the connection with Jeremiah is not so frequently made. Shortly after the passage quoted above, we find the following: They have treated the wound of

Jesus was claiming that this one god was redefining Israel around himself and his kingdom-proclamation; that, as part of that work, the purity to which Torah pointed would be achieved by the prophets’ dream of a cleansed heart; and that, as a result, the traditions which attempted to bolster Israel’s national identity were out of date and out of

Forgiveness was an eschatological blessing; if Israel went into exile because of her sins, then forgiveness consists in her returning: returning to YHWH, returning from exile.251 Jesus’ action and claim indicated that this symbol of return was now becoming a reality. If the authors of the Scrolls believed that their group, being the real

The sermon—to take it for the moment as a whole—is not a mere miscellany of ethical instruction. It cannot be generalized into a set of suggestions, or even commands, on how to be ‘good’. Nor can it be turned into a guide-map for how to go to ‘heaven’ after death. It is rather, as it stands, a challenge to Israel to be Israel.

The command to forsake riches and to follow Jesus appears to have been very specific to this young man. We are not told that Jesus said this sort of thing regularly, or even often (though the warnings against riches, and trust in them, is of course frequent).

This is not a piece of ‘teaching’ about ‘religion’ or ‘morality’; nor is it the dissemination of a timeless truth. It is a claim about eschatology. The time is fulfilled; the exile is over; the bridegroom is at hand. Jesus’ acted symbol, feasting rather than fasting, brings into public visibility his controversial claim, that in his work Israel’s

One well-worn traditional Christian position is to say that the Jewish background is a mass of legalism and formalism, and that Jesus came to teach a different sort of religion, namely, an interior spiritual sort. This is clearly no good.32 If it were true, Jesus would have been simply incomprehensible, a teacher of abstract and interior truths to

The point of the present kingdom is that it is the first-fruits of the future kingdom; and the future kingdom involves the abolition, not of space, time, or the cosmos itself, but rather of that which threatens space, time, and creation, namely, sin and death. The vision of 1 Corinthians 15 thus coheres neatly with that of Romans 8:18–27, and, for

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