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

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

From all of this it should be clear that Jesus regarded his ministry as in continuity with, and bringing to a climax, the work of the great prophets of the Old Testament, culminating in John the Baptist, whose initiative he had used as his launching-pad.

the all-important distinction is not between outward and inward, or between earning grace and expressing it, but between that outer and inner state which is evil all through (albeit, from time to time, appearing outwardly clean) and that outer and inner state which is being renewed all through.

Since most historical characters worth studying are so because they held mindsets that formed significant variations on the parent worldview, this latter move will always be risky. (The Queen sacrifice may after all have taken place, obedient to some extraordinary new strategy.

We must instead accept at face value what the Jewish sources themselves say: these laws, with all their detail and specificity, formed the boundary fence around the people of Israel, the nation of the Jews.

If, again, we think that Jesus, in his ‘eschatological’ teaching, expected the end of the space-time world, the whole point of his detailed instructions is lost. Jesus’ kingdom-story was about a very different sort of eschatological fulfilment, one that was in fact far more consonant with other first-century Jewish expectations, and one which gener

it was assumed that talk of the ‘kingdom of god’, or of the ‘son of man coming on the clouds of heaven’, was to be taken as a literal prediction of events, shortly to take place, which would close the space-time order. But not only is it unnecessary to read apocalyptic language in this way: it is actually necessary, as historians, that we refuse to

So, sharpening up these issues into our five main questions: How does Jesus fit into the Judaism of his day? What were his aims? Why did he die? How did the early church come into being, and why did it take the shape it did? and Why are the gospels what they are?28 The sixth question is something of a joker in the pack, though every writer on Jesus

What we have here, then, is not a generalized moral tale per se, which just happens to be about a Jew and a Samaritan because they form a good example of a long-standing cultural feud. Nor yet is it a generalized and abstract example of the demolition of traditional categories or the fracturing of ‘worlds of meaning’. These obvious and, in themselv