Revelation for Everyone (New Testament for Everyone)

it is in the four canonical gospels, not in some dodgy reconstruction behind or beyond them, that we find the great emphasis on the coming of God’s kingdom in the actual events of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension. But the coming of the kingdom is conspicuously absent not only from the great creeds, but also from “the gospel” as envi

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of a cleansed heart; and that, as a result, the traditions which attempted to bolster Israel’s national identity were out of date and out of li

There is, in other words, a clear line all the way from Genesis 11, via Isaiah 40–55 and Daniel 7, to Mark 10, and thereby in turn to Mark 14–15, where Jesus meets his captors, his judges, and his death. He not only theorizes about the difference between pagan power and the kind of power he is claiming; he enacts it.

Jesus understood his own vocation as that of a prophet announcing that Israel’s god was now at last becoming king. This had two particular focal points: the return of Israel from exile (chapter 6 above), and the return of YHWH to Zion (chapter 14 below). Both of these themes relate closely and obviously to the Temple. When the return happens, the T