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

Jesus, in other words, appears to be deliberately evoking the whole context in Jeremiah. The cursing of the fig tree is part of his sorrowful Jeremianic demonstration that Israel, and the Temple, are under judgment.

Most writers now agree that eating with ‘sinners’ was one of the most characteristic and striking marks of Jesus’ regular activity.242 This would not have been of any significance, of course, if Jesus were acting simply as a private individual. But when it is allied with the claim, made in praxis and story, that Jesus was inaugurating the long-awai

Granted that the original permission to divorce was given because of the nation’s hard-heartedness, Jesus’ refusal of that permission only makes sense if he envisaged his hearers’ hard-heartedness somehow being dealt with. The only explanation for that, which fits like a glove with the rest of Jesus’ kingdom-story, is that he believed himself to be

the task before the serious historian of Jesus is not in the first instance conceived as the reconstruction of traditions about Jesus, according to their place within the history of the early church, but the advancement of serious historical hypotheses—that is, the telling of large-scale narratives—about Jesus himself, and the examination of the pr

Jesus’ parables, as we saw in the previous chapter, continue the long Jewish tradition of telling the story of Israel herself, and showing how it is arriving at its paradoxical conclusion.

Family and property, then, were not for the ancient Jew simply what they are to the modern western world. Both carried religious and cultural significance far beyond personal, let alone ‘individual’, identity and security. Both functioned symbolically within the total Jewish worldview. To both, Jesus levelled a direct challenge: those who followed

He rejects, rightly, any idea that what Jesus found amiss with Pharisaic teaching was ‘pettifogging legalism’. He offers, instead, a category which I would myself, in broad terms, endorse: Jesus was announcing ‘restoration eschatology’.

The evidence, it seems to me, is actually quite straightforward: Jesus performed mighty deeds, which did in fact call forth the charge that he was a magician, in league with demonic forces.171 But what does this charge mean? It means, not least, that Jesus was perceived to be posing a serious threat to the social, cultural and religious world of hi

We must, however, stress again: as far as the disciples, good first-century Jews as they were, were concerned, there was no reason whatever for them to be thinking about the end of the space-time universe. There was no reason, either in their own background or in a single thing that Jesus had said to them up to that point, for it even to occur to t