Sublime

God’s kingdom is not simply designed for ‘heaven’, because God is the creator of the whole world, and his entire purpose is to reclaim that whole world as his own and to set it on the way to become the place he always intended it to be, before human rebellion pulled it so disastrously off track. That, in fact, is the message of the four gospels, de

the conviction ‘that a sufficiently careful exegesis of the sayings material will lead to “a correct decision”, has led many a New Testament scholar into a quagmire from which he has never emerged’.

But I do not think that Jesus’ action was motivated by his expectation that YHWH would shortly build a new Temple of bricks and mortar. I think that Jesus saw himself, and perhaps his followers with him, as the new Temple (see below, chapter 13).

We need to think about the ways in which the story of Israel was being told at the time.

With the mesocosmic level there can be no problem in principle; all agree that the serious task of historical reconstruction, applied to first-century Palestine, is the essential setting for any study of Jesus.

What Jesus was offering, in other words, was not a different religious system. It was a new world order, the end of Israel’s long desolation, the true and final ‘forgiveness of sins’, the inauguration of the kingdom of god.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being “biblica

Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans.

The same was true about Jesus’ claim to be able to provide forgiveness.250 This ‘forgiveness’ should not be thought of as a detached, ahistorical blessing, such as might be offered by anyone at any time.