Sublime

Israel’s hope was conceived in relation to land, family, Torah and Temple; Jesus subverted the common interpretation of these, and offered his own fresh and positive alternatives.

Someone who is telling strangely familiar stories and meaning the wrong things by them will land up in trouble.

Jesus’s controversies with his opponents, particularly the Pharisees, have regularly been interpreted on the assumption that the Pharisees had one system for “going to heaven” (in their case, keeping lots of stringent and fussy rules), and Jesus had another one, an easier path altogether in which God had relaxed the rules and made everything a lot

John describes Jesus not only as the Temple in person, but as the one in whom everything that would normally happen in the Temple is fulfilled, completed, accomplished.

Jesus was indeed talking about God, but was talking about God precisely in order to explain his own kingdom work.

My anxiety, rather, is this: in grasping the way in which Jesus’ programme cut against the normal social expectations of Mediterranean peasant culture, Crossan, like Mack (though not so blatantly), has radically and consistently underplayed the specifically Jewish dimension both of the culture itself and of Jesus’ agenda for it.

The early Christian writers were, of course, setting forth an eschatology that had been inaugurated, but not fully consummated; they were celebrating (Paul is quite explicit on this point in 1 Cor. 15:20–28) something that has already happened, but at the same time something that still has to happen in the future. They believed themselves to be liv

Christ