Sublime

And if he was expecting the “end of the world,” well, we’re still waiting.

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

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

What Jesus did and said in relation to the symbols of Jewish identity grew not from an intention to propagate a system of religion or ethics, certainly not from an ‘opposition’ to ‘Judaism’ conceived as a ‘religious system’, but from the conviction that the climax of Israel’s history was dawning, bringing with it great opportunity and great danger.

What is the gospel?

First, to treat Q as a ‘gospel’ runs way beyond the evidence. Even if it did exist as a separate document, the word ‘gospel’ means ‘good news’, and the force of that phrase comes precisely from the sense of Israel’s god bringing her history to its appointed goal—which, according to Kloppenborg and his followers, was precisely what

The problem is that we have all read the gospels, if we haven’t been careful, simply as God’s answer to the plight of the human race in general. The implied backstory hasn’t been the story of Abraham, of Moses, of David, of the prophets; it’s been the story of Adam and Eve, of “Everyman,” sinning and dying and needing to be redeemed.

Second, it does so within an essentially simple framework, which places Jesus credibly within the turbulent world of first-century Judaism. I can imagine people disliking this picture of Jesus; I cannot imagine someone arguing coherently that it could not be historical.