For over a century, scholarship on the origins of Christianity has been dealing with a fundamental issue – the Jesus in the earliest Christian texts is presented as preaching an eschatological message about an imminent apocalypse. Despite ongoing rearguard actions, the idea that the historical Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet remains the most likely interpretation of the evidence.
A Galilean Peasant’s World
If in the early first century AD a preacher appeared in a Galilean village proclaiming repentance in the face of an imminent cosmic apocalypse, most listeners would have been familiar with his message and many would have welcomed it. Devout Jews in this period had inherited a theology whereby they were the Chosen People of God who lived in the Promised Land granted to them by him. But by the time Herod Antipas came to rule Galilee, these ideas were difficult to reconcile with the realities of the average Jewish peasant’s existence.
To begin with, life for our peasant was hard. If they were the head of a household, it was difficult enough to scrape a living for them and their family by farming, herding or fishing, but they also had to pay heavy taxes to the Tetrarch Herod, who was the son of the hated King Herod the Great and, like his late father, a puppet ruler for the Roman Empire. This meant our peasant not only had to pay enough tax to keep Herod Antipas in luxury in his newly built capital of Tiberias – which he had named after his Roman patron, the emperor Tiberius – he also had to pay still more tax for Herod to pass on to his Roman masters. As a result, it is estimated a Galilean Jewish household handed over more than one third of its income and production in taxes. Not surprisingly, these taxes were resented and those who made a living collecting them were despised as corrupt quislings. The burden of heavy taxation meant that an increasing number of peasants had to give up farming their own land and take up day labour on that of others. In good seasons things were hard and in bad ones they could be deadly.
Herod Antipas had been granted rule of Galilee and the more southern territory of Perea on the death of his father Herod the Great. His brother Herod Philip ruled a wide territory to the east, including Batanea, Trachonitis, and Auranitis. And his older brother Herod Archelaus had ruled Judea, Samaria and Idumea to the south, until the Romans had decided he was incompetent and removed him, installing a Roman prefectus in his place. Just as under old Herod the Great, these men held their petty kingdoms as clients of the Roman emperor and were hated for it by most of their subjects. They were also Idumeans: only recently converted to Judaism and regarded as worse than gentiles by many devout Jews. Herod the Great’s sons were well aware of their unpopularity and also inherited their father’s talent for repression – spies were active, uprisings were crushed and troublemakers were dealt with swiftly and painfully.
But our peasant would have known that things had not always been this way. The scriptures he and his neighbours heard read and discussed each sabbath emphasised the ideas already mentioned – that as Jews they were God’s chosen and living in the land he promised to their ancestors. But in the period since the Jewish people had been conquered, dominated and often oppressed by a succession of foreign powers. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Ptolemaic and then the Seleucid kings and finally the Romans had all ruled over the supposed Promised Land, and for many this constant foreign domination had become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the idea of somehow being God’s chosen people.
Traditionally, this foreign domination had been explained as the sign of God’s displeasure with his people and as punishment for straying from his Law. This had certainly been the message of many of the prophets and the remedy was to repent, avoid foreign ways and worship and turn back to God. But in the two centuries before our Galilean peasant’s time a new cosmology had developed in Judaism – one which offered both an explanation for and a solution to the oppression under which our peasant suffered.
The Apocalyptic Cosmos
In the centuries between the composition of the last books of the Jewish Bible and the first texts that were to make up the Christian New Testament there was a massive shift in the Jewish conception of the world. Concepts and figures that would come to dominate Christianity and play a significant role in rabinnical Judaism and the emergence of Islam first appeared or fully developed in this “Intertestamental Period”. The concept of Satan as an rebellious opponent of Yahweh rather than one of his servants, along with the idea that he led an array of devils and demons who were eternally at war with the heavenly host of God’s angels begins to appear in this period. The idea of a coming Messiah develops in various directions out of a general concept of a future king who would restore the lost independence of Israel and taking on a wider, cosmic dimension – with the Messiah even pre-existing in the heavens. Ideas about Yahweh fully move from a form of henothesism – the idea that other gods exist but that this one is the most important – to full monotheism. At the same time, the conception that aspects of God – called hypostases – were distinct from him even to the extent of being seen as almost separate beings also developed. Sometimes these beings were seen as angelic celestial entities or even referred to as “gods”. Finally, the idea that there was a Hell, reserved for the punishment of the wicked and the ultimate punishment of Satan and his rebel demons also began to develop, in several forms.
As Philip Jenkins details in his excellent recent survey of these developments, Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World:
During the two tempestuous centuries from 250 through 50 BCE, the Jewish and Jewish derived world was a fiery crucible of values, faiths and ideas, from which emerged wholly new religious syntheses. Such a sweeping transformation of religious thought in such a relatively brief period makes this one of the most revolutionary times in human culture.
p. xv
This revolutionary change in the Jewish conception of the cosmos had many origins. Domination and continuing influence by the Persian Empire meant that Persian religious ideas increasingly permeated Jewish theology, so many aspects of the angels, demons and cosmic warfare that emerges in Jewish texts in this period of change have obvious Persian antecedents. But later and increasing influence from Hellenic culture also wrought other changes: solidifying Jewish monotheism in the face of Greek polytheistic paganism on one hand, while also adding sophisticated philosophical layers to Jewish theology on the other. The influence of Platonic thought, in particular, can be found in the increasing conception of the material world as a reflection of a perfect heavenly exemplar, along with the idea that the Temple, the Torah, Jerusalem and the Messiah all had or have a celestial existence or pre-existence.
Of course, the other major influence on this cosmological revolution was the history of conquest and domination of the Jewish people by a succession of foreign powers already noted above. For our Galilean peasant, most of these new cosmological ideas would have been accepted as having always been part of Jewish belief and many of them would have come together, both to explain the opppressive circumstances that he and his people lived in and to give hope that one day, perhaps one day soon, God will act to relieve their oppression and restore Israel to the Chosen People.
So the idea of a return of the Jewish king of Israel became entangled in these cosmic ideas about a war between God and Satan and an angelic, pre-existent Messiah who was coming to earth to save God’s people. God had withdrawn most of his active power from the material world and it had become the domain of demons and their earthly servants; the Romans, the Herodians and the unrighteous Jews who collaborated with them. But the day was coming when the Messiah would arise, God would intervene in the world, the angels would defeat the demonic forces, the dead would be raised to life and everyone, living and dead, would be judged by the Messiah, sitting at God’s right hand. The unrighteous would be cast into Hell and the righteous would enjoy a restored world, with all nations under Israel and the Messiah ruling as God’s anointed one. Our Aramaic-speaking peasant would have referred to this coming time as the “malkutha d’bashmaya“. In Greek it was ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ – the “kingship/kingdom of God” and any preacher who came to our peasant’s village declaring that it was coming soon would likely have, at very least, found an interested audience.
Jesus’ “Good News”
The first words presented as being spoken by Jesus in the first chapter of the earliest gospel are:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in this good news.”
(Mark 1:15)
The writer of gMark does not depict Jesus explaining what he means and expects his audience to understand – here Jesus is proclaiming that the expected end time had come, that the kingship of God was close and that those who believed this and repented would join the righteous when the imminent apocalypse arrived. Far from being a prophet of doom, Jesus is depicted proclaiming this imminent event as “good news” – the relief from oppression, both human and demonic, was almost here. And this succinct summary is effectively the whole of his message in this and in the other two synoptic gospels (gMatt and gLuke); the word “gospel” literally means “[the] good news”.
One of the key elements of this message was its urgency and immediacy; in these earliest texts Jesus is not depicted as proclaiming that this world-changing event will happen some time in the distant future, but that it was happening soon. Very soon, in fact. This is something that the synoptic gospels generally emphasise repeatedly:
“Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
(Mark 9:1; cf. Matt 16:28 and Luke 9:27)
Later, after predicting the fall of the Temple, detailing the End Times tribulations and the subsequent arrival of God’s cosmic intervention, Jesus is depicted repeating:
“Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”
(Mark 13:30)
And the writer of gMatt also emphasises the imminence of the coming apocalypse in a reported saying that seems to be even more urgent:
“When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.”
(Matt 10:23)
This Matt 10:23 saying may reflect an insistence by the historical Jesus that the apocalypse was coming any day, with the “this generation” sayings noted above reflecting a later reaction to the fact that decades had passed without the “kingship” arriving. But all of these reported sayings reflect an emphasis in urgency and imminence; as do many other elements in the synoptics. When we turn to the parables that Jesus is depicted telling in the synoptic gospels, once again we find that not only is the coming apocalypse their central theme, but its imminence is repeatedly emphasised. For example:
“But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
(Luke 12:39-40, cf. Matt 24:48-50)
Likewise, Luke 12:45-46 (cf. Matt 24:48-50) has a servant misbehaving and carousing while his master is away and warns “the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour that he does not know, and will cut him in pieces, and put him with the unfaithful” (v. 46). Similarly, the parable of the bridesmaids ends with the warning:
“Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
(Matt 25:13)
Then there is a similar exhortation in Luke 12:36:
“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.”
This emphasis on the imminence of the coming apocalypse is, again, not unique to the reported teaching of Jesus. We find it in other, earlier Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic works. For example:
For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. (Habakkuk 2:3)
I am bringing my righteousness near, it is not far away; and my salvation will not be delayed. (Isa 46:13)
The age is hurrying swiftly to its end … judgement is now drawing near. (4 Ezra 4:26, 8:61)
The advent of the times is very short … the end which the Most High prepared is near. (2 Bar 85:10, 82:20)
Of course, nothing in the Judaism of this period was uniform and there are other traditions that do imply the kingship of God is a more distant eventuality or are far more ambiguous about when it will come about. But in the synoptic gospels, and most clearly in gMark and gMatt, the emphasis is very much on urgency and the imminence of the coming transformation of the cosmos.
Another consistent theme in the reported teaching of Jesus in the synoptics is the idea that the coming apocalypse will be cataclysmic, painful and violent:
“For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places …. For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be …. ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from heaven and the powers of heaven will be shaken’.”
(Matt 24, cf. Mark 13 and Luke 21)
Again, this passage draws on earlier prophetic literature and is paralleled in other Jewish apocalyptic works:
For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light…Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt (Isa 13:10; 24:6)
There shall be a time of suffering, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. (Daniel 12:1)
The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast…a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements…in the fire of his passion the whole earth shall be consumed; for a full, a terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth. (Zephaniah 1)
Noises and confusion, thunders and earthquake, tumult on the earth!…every nation prepared for war, to fight against the righteous nation. It was a day of darkness and gloom, of tribulation and distress, affliction and great tumult on the earth! (Greek Esther 11:8)
But the emphasis in the reported teaching of the synoptic gospels’ Jesus is that the coming apocalypse is “good news”. Why? Because it represented a solution to all the problems of people like our early first century Jewish peasant.
“The First Shall Be Last”
Probably the best known passage from the gospels is the prayer attributed to Jesus and now prayed, usually without much thought to its meaning, by Christians around the world. It is known as the Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
(Matt 6:9-13; cf. Luke 11:2-4)
Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread [or “our bread for tomorrow”].
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
Everything in this prayer fits Jesus’ reported apocalyptic theology. God is king in heaven, but the prayer looks forward in hope to when his rule once again extends fully to earth as well. It urges mercy by invoking the forgiveness shown to others. And it asks for short-term sustenance and pleads to be rescued from Satan’s dominance of the earth.
As already noted, for our hypothetical first century Jewish peasant, that Satanic dominance was not some abstract theological principle – he would have seen it as manifest in the oppression he and his community suffered under the Herodians and their Roman masters. This is why, for all the pain and horror the coming apocalypse would bring (the “the birth pangs” of Mark 13:8 and Matt 24:8), the coming kingship of God was “good news” indeed. Because the kingship of God would bring a reversal of the current situation – a world turned upside down, where the humble are lifted up and the oppressors are humbled.
All Christians and even most non-Christians are familiar with “the Beatitudes”: a sermon by Jesus reported in Matt 5:3-12 and in a variant form in Luke 6:20-22 which celebrates this cosmic reversal:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
(Matt 5:3-12)
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven
These blessings are usually taken by modern Christians as general words of comfort, but in the context of Jesus’ reported apocalyptic preaching they are a prophecy that underpins the “good news”. Those who mourn now, will be comforted when the kingship of God comes. Those who thirst for “righteousness” (i.e. δικαιοσύνη – justness, divine justice) now, will receive it then. Less well-known and less emphasised by Christian preachers is the subsequent passage in the Lucan version of these blessings, that call down corresponding “woes” on the unrighteous:
“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
(Luke 6:24-26)
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
Anyone who heard this sermon and were poor, hungry, mourning and reviled would likely be glad to hear their rich and powerful oppressors would not be laughing when the apocalypse came. This was “good news” indeed to a peasant audience in first century Galilee who had almost certainly done their share of mourning.
Again, this cosmic reversal is a key element in Jesus’ reported apocalyptic preaching:
“But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
(Mark 10:31; cf. Matt 20:16 and Luke 13:30)
And, again, this theme of a reveral of the current order is a theme found other Jewish apocalyptic works:
And those who died in sorrow shall be raised in joy; and those who died in poverty for the Lord’s sake shall be made rich; those who died on account of the Lord shall be wakened to life (Testament of Judah, 25:4)
Those who are on top here are at the bottom there, and those who are at the bottom here are on the top there. (b. Pesah, 50a)
As uncomfortable as it may be for many modern liberal Christians and those with a post-Christian conception of Jesus as some mellow hippy teacher, this reversal also involved judgement and punishment for those deemed unrighteous:
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left …. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life
(Matt 25:31-33, 46)
The reported teaching of Jesus in the synoptics is quite clear that part of the whole point of the coming apocalypse was the eternal punishment of the wicked and the oppressors and the references to this, both explicit and in parables, are many: see Luke 16:23, Mark 9:43, Mark 9:48, Matt. 13:42 and Matt. 10:28.
As satisfying as this idea of his oppressors and enemies being punished eternally while he and his loved ones are rewarded may have been, our Galilean peasant would be aware that generations had lived and died under the earthly domination of Satan and his human minions. But the apocalyptic theology of the time had developed the idea of a general resurrection of the dead when the kingship of God came, so that everyone – living and dead – could be judged and given their just desserts. Again, this idea was well established long before Jesus’ time:
… the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting life, because we have died for his laws… (2 Maccabees 7:9)
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky… (Daniel 12)
You have redeemed my soul from the pit. From Sheol and Abaddon You have raised me up to an eternal height…The perverse spirit You have cleansed from great transgression, that he might take his sacred with the host of the holy ones, and enter together with the congregation of the sons of heaven. (1QH 11:19-22)
… now you will shine like the luminaries of heaven, you will shine and appear, and the portals of heaven will be opened for you…And the righteous and the chosen will have arisen from the earth, and have ceased to cast down their faces, and have put on the garment of glory. (1 Enoch 104)
It needs to be emphasised again that none of these ideas were universally accepted by Jews in this period and it is unclear exactly how widely accepted any of them were. This conception of a coming general rising of the dead in particular seems to have been contentious, and Jesus is depicted debating the Sadducees on this very point (see Mark 12:1-27). But the idea was clearly well-established and believed by enough people for it to be a key element in Jesus’ reported teaching – see Luke 14:14 and Matt 22:30; cf. Luke 20:34-36, Mark 12:22-25. And in the Jesus traditions, as in earlier Jewish apocalyptic texts, this judgement was to be made by the Messiah, called the “Son of Man”:
And he sat on the Throne of His Glory and the whole judgment was given to the Son of Man and he will cause the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from the face of the Earth. And those who led astray the world will be bound in chains and will be shut up in the assembly-place of their destruction, and all their works will pass away from the face of the earth.
And from then on there will be nothing corruptible. For that Son of Man has appeared, and has sat on the Throne of His Glory, and everything evil will pass away and go from in front of Him; and the word of that Son of Man will be strong in front of the Lord of Spirits. (1Enoch 69: 27-29)But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. (Mark 13:24-26)
Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. (Mark 14:61-62)
There is a vast scholarly literature on the intricacies of Jewish expectations about the Messiah in this period, how common and widespread such expectation was and where and how the Jesus depicted in the gospels fits into it. The title “the Son of Man” has whole shelf-loads of books on it, along with a debate about whether it can always (or even ever) be applied to the Messiah or even if Jesus applied it to himself as a claim to be the Messiah. It is not clear whether the historical Jesus did indeed see himself as the Messiah, whether he came to do so over time, whether this was the “secret” referred to several times in gMark, or whether Messianic status was something imposed on him by his followers in the wake of his sudden execution as a way to make sense of his death.
All that aside, regardless of whether Jesus declared himself to be the Messiah/”Son of Man” (which is the climax of gMark in Mark 14:61-62 and Mark 15:39) or if he saw the Messiah as someone else (as implied by a saying preserved in Mark 8:38), the Messiah was also central to the reported teaching of Jesus in the synoptics.
“I Watched Satan Fall from Heaven …”
If most non-Christians were asked to mention any of the alleged miracles of Jesus they would usually choose one of the more spectacular wondrous deeds referred to in the gospels: feeding the five thousand or walking on water etc. But the majority of the miracles referred to in the gospels, often almost casually and in passing, fall into two broad categories: healings and exorcisms. To the synoptic gospel writers, these acts were clearly integral to his ministry and directly connected to his message of the coming kingship of God:
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.
(Matt 4:23-25)
These healings and exorcisms are not simply displays of his power or of the power he has through the agency of God as God’s Messiah, rather they are explicitly stated to be a sign of the imminence of the coming apocalypse and a prefiguring of the kingship of God. In Luke 7:18-23 the imprisoned John the Baptist is depicted as sending disciples to question Jesus:
So John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” When the men had come to him, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’”
(Luke 7:18-20)
Jesus’ response is very specific:
Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
(Luke 7: 21-23)
This is a direct reference to two texts from Isaiah which were taken to be prophecies of the coming kingship of God:
(Isaiah 35:5-6)
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert
(Isaiah 61:1)
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners
So what Jesus is claiming is that the kingdom of God is very close because these things that are attributed to it are being foreshadowed through his miracles. His ministry is a foretaste of what is soon to come. The exorcisms are something modern Christianity tends not to emphasise, but which were integral to the gospel depictions of who and what Jesus was. Not only is Jesus depicted casting out demons, but they are depicted as recognising who he was and what his presence meant about the coming kingship of God:
When he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demoniacs coming out of the tombs met him. They were so fierce that no one could pass that way. Suddenly they shouted, “What have you to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
(Matt 8:28-29)
And, again, Jesus is depicted as stating that the defeat of demons is another sign that the kingship of God is imminent:
But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you. Or how can one enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property, without first tying up the strong man? Then indeed the house can be plundered.
(Matt 12:28-29)
Here the “strong man” is Satan and his “house” is the world. The power Jesus has over demons is another inversion of the current order and a sign that when the apocalyptic kingdom comes the rule over the world by Satan, his demonic servants and their human quislings will come to an end. This is why the demons of Matt 8:28-29 (above) and its synoptic cognates ask him “Have you come here to torment us before the time?” The demons know that their time is up and when the kingship of God is fully established they will be vanquished.
The idea that the earthly realm was dominated by demonic powers was widely held by Jews in this period, as was the idea that the coming kingship of God would see these powers defeated. One of the Dead Sea Scroll texts associates the coming of the apocalyptic kingship with the defeat of demonic powers:
By the spendour of the swelling of the glory of his kingdom…I proclaim the majesty of his beauty to frighten and terrify all the spirits of the destroying angels and the spirits of the bastards, the demons, Lilith…
(4Q510, 1.4)
And Jesus is consistently depicted as noting that his coming and the power he and his followers have over demonic forces are signs of the fulfilment of prophecy about the coming final victory. In Luke 10 Jesus is depicted sending out seventy of his followers to spread his message. Later, they return to him:
The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you.
(Luke 10:17-19)
Again, for our Galilean peasant, someone who proclaimed the coming apocalyptic kingship of God while seemingly displaying power over demons through exorcisms would be making a significant statement. For our peasant, the power of demons was not only demonstrated through the affliction of people with epilepsy and mental illness, but also through the oppression of “the poor” (another consistent theme in Jesus’ preaching) by tax collectors, by the Herodians, by aristocratic Jewish quislings and by the Romans who dominated them all. To our peasant, these were not just political or socio-economic forces of oppression, they were expressions of Satan’s dominance over the world. And someone like Jesus would have be a sign of hope that, one day very soon, that dominance would be overthrown, the earth would be renewed, the dead would rise, “righteousness” would be established and the Messiah would rule at the right hand of God over a re-established twelve tribes of Israel in a perfected world. This was a powerful message.
From Apocalyptic Prophet to Divine Saviour
There is a consistent pattern to the apocalypticism in the New Testament texts – it is clear, emphasised and consistent in the earliest texts and then is toned down or almost completely removed in most of the later ones. As can be seen above, the depiction of Jesus as a eschatological prophet of the coming apocalypse is at the core of the earliest gospels – the synoptics gMark, gMatt and gLuke. But it is also to be found in the authentic Pauline material. Indeed, the text that is likely to be the very earliest Christian work we have – First Thessalonians – is explicit in its eschatological expectations. Paul is certain that the risen Jesus was to undertake a παρουσία: (parousia) a technical term which does not just mean a “coming” or a “presence”, but which was used to refer to a royal arrival or visitation. And for Paul this “coming” was going to accompany the coming of the kingship of God. Jesus was God’s “son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead … who rescues us from the wrath that is coming” (1Thess 1:10). He prays for the Jesus Sect community in Thessalonica so God will “strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1Thess 3:13). And he is clear that this apocalypse (“the wrath that is coming”) and Jesus’ royal parousia is coming very soon:
For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.
(1Thess 4:14-17)
This is an encapsulation of Paul’s eschatology, with its heavy emphasis on Jesus’ resurrection as a precursor to the general resurrection that will come with the arrival of the kingship of God. But the point to note here is Paul is certain that this will happen very soon, and refers to “we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord”. He believes this will happen in his lifetime and that of his audience in Thessalonica. This is not some event in the distant and undefined future. And it is not some spiritual or psychological state. For Paul, it is an event that will happen and will happen very soon.
As already noted above, this idea of the imminence of the apocalypse and the urgency this engenders is a consistent theme in the earlier gospels.
Mark 14:62 has Jesus proclaiming himself as the Messianic “Son of Man” and predicting that the high priest will “see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.”
But by the time gLuke was written, however, some of these earlier statements about the imminence of the apocalypse seem to have become awkward and we see the Luke-Acts author tempering them somewhat. So in gLuke the prediction that the now long-dead high priest would see the Son of Man come in the apocalypse is changed:
They said, “If you are the Messiah, tell us.” He replied, “If I tell you, you will not believe; and if I question you, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.”
(Luke 22:67-69)
The gLuke version shifts the imminent apocalyptic parousia of Jesus as the Messianic “Son of Man” from being an event that the high priest will live to see to a more mystical cosmic state of affairs that would happen “from now on”. Similarly, in a pericope unique to gLuke, Jesus is depicted as saying the kingship of God is, at least in some sense, not a coming event but a fulfilled state of affairs:
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among [or within] you.”
(Luke 17:20-21)
These changes in emphasis seem to reflect changes in expectation and interpretation as time went by, the “this generation” of Mark 9:1 aged and died and the expected apocalypse did not arrive. We see further signs of this in the latest of the gospels, gJohn. There the whole emphasis on the coming kingdom, which is central to the eschatological theology of gMark and gMatt, or even the return and apocalyptic παρουσία of the risen Jesus that is cental to Paul is toned down and almost completely replaced by a new focus. For the writer of gJohn, the centre of Jesus’ message is Jesus himself.
While all of the earlier texts clearly see Jesus as a saviour, in gJohn his coming and redemptive death do not herald the intervention of God in the world, they are that intervention. In the last gospel, Jesus is divine and it is his coming and his death that is the fulfillment of God’s promises to man. So the emphasis in gJohn shifts almost completely from the imminent coming of the apocalypse to the realised arrival of Jesus as divine saviour and redeemer. This is how he is presented in his very first appearance in the gospel:
The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ …. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
(John 1:29-34)
gJohn still has residual mentions of a “kingdom of God” (e.g. John 3:1-10), but they seem to be references to being saved and redeemed through belief in Jesus rather than a coming apocalyptic event. Another residual apocalyptic element in gJohn is the odd reference to how “the rumor spread in the community that [the beloved disciple] would not die” because Jesus reportedly said to Peter about him “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” (John 21:22-23). But the gospel writer is quick to note that “Jesus did not say to him that he would not die” (v. 23), implying that by the time gJohn was written the disciple in question was indeed dead and Jesus’ coming had not occured.
gJohn effectively removes the heavy emphasis on not just the imminence of the coming apocalyptic kingship of God, but on the whole apocalypse. And this shift away from the idea of the kingdom of God as a soon to come cosmic event is found throughout most of the later New Testament and non-canonical texts. By the time we get to gThomas, the transition from a cosmic to a spiritual and internal expectation of the “kingdom” is complete:
“Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you,” and “is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it”
(Thom 3, 113)
Of course, this does not mean apocalyptic expectation disappeared from early Christianity – the existence of the book of Revelation makes it clear that it did not. But it remained an element of the faith that sometimes did not sit well with the idea that Jesus was the divine Redeemer and the apocalpse and Jesus’ “second coming” to this day are often shuffled off to a distant or at least undetermined future time, with emphasis placed on reported sayings of Jesus about how “that day and hour no one knows” (Matt 24:36). Certain sects and branches of Christianity have always and continue to make apocalyptic expectation central to their theology, but most Christian theological emphasis has been more Johannine, with the synoptics usually being interpreted through and reconciled with the Redeemer theology of gJohn. As a result, Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet is usually barely noticed by Christians today, despite his prominence in most of their gospel materials.
Resisting the Kingdom
That the historical Jesus was most likely a Jewish apocalyptic prophet preaching the coming kingship of God to fellow Galilean peasants is an interpretation that has dominated the study of the origins of Christianity for over a century. In his 1910 masterpiece The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer traced the scholarship on who the historical Jesus was from the eighteenth century attempts at gospel harmonisation to the Historical Jesus Quest his own day, and decided that the idea of Jesus as an eschatological prophet preaching a coming apocalypse was the inevitable conclusion that had to be drawn. He gave a ringing endorsement to the views of his contemporary Johannes Weiss, who had independently come to the same conclusion:
[Weiss’] ‘Jesus’ Proclaimation of the Kngdom of God’, published in 1892, is in its own way as important as Strauss’ first Life of Jesus. He lays down the third great alternative which the study of the life of Jesus had to meet. The first was laid down by Strauss: either purely historical or purely supernatural. The second had been worked out by the Tübingen school and Holtzmann: either synopic or Johannine. Now came the third: either eschatological or non-eschatological!
Schweitzer, p. 198
Weiss and, after him, Schweitzer threw down the gauntlet to other historical Jesus scholars: they had to account for the clear evidence that Jesus was an eschatological prophet proclaiming the imminent coming of an apocalypse and the kingship of God. This was awkward for many of their colleagues and remains awkward for many today because it cuts against the person many people would like Jesus to be.
Obviously, a Jesus who was an apocalyptic prophet who proclaimed the kingship of God as coming in his lifetime or that of his listeners does not fit well with orthodox Christian beliefs, so conservative scholars have to work to explain all the evidence above in a way that somehow maintains the idea that Jesus was “God the Son” and a deity in human form – no small task. Others who want to see Jesus as a wise teacher and preacher of social justice or personal transformation also have a problem with the apocalyptic Jesus, as a message of coming judgement and hellfire does not fit well with their conception of him either. And the current crop of fringe Jesus Mythicists also dislike the idea of Jesus as an eschatological prophet, as this makes him rather too much a man of and in his time and so makes his historicity uncomfortably likely for these contrarians. Now, as in Schweitzer’s time, almost all historical Jesus studies is either an endorsement of or a rear-guard action against the unavoidably powerful idea that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.
Most of those who reacted to Weiss and Schweitzer took an angle still used by more conservative Christian scholars today – the idea that Jesus himself represented God’s intervention in the world and that all references to the “kingdom of God” are to him and his arrival. This “realised eschatology” is most closely associated with J.A.T. Robinson and C.H. Dodd and a form of it is still used by current conservatives like N.T. Wright. But Schweitzer laid out the arguments against this tactic back in 1910 and more modern attempts to prop up this idea do not have any more strength than they had a century ago. As many of the gospel texts cited and quoted above show, Jesus is consistently depicted as declaring the kingship of God as something that is “close” or “draws near” and is “coming”. As we have seen, it is only in the later texts that this gets replaced by the idea that it is “among you” or is embodied in the Redeemer Jesus.
The liberal Christians of the “Jesus Seminar” have attempted a large-scale assault on the idea of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, preferring to see him as a “aphoristic sage” preaching social and moral reform. Marcus Borg has been at the forefront of these arguments, attempting to argue that Jesus may have made eschatological statements about a future apocalypse, but it was not central to his message and he did not believe it to be coming in his lifetime or that of his listeners. The arguments of Borg and his followers are complex and they and the responses to them can be found in Robert J. Miller (ed.) The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate (2001). A fundamental problem with Borg’s contention that the apocalyptic sayings about the imminence of the apocalypse are later ideas and not genuine indications of the historical Jesus’ preaching is they can be found in an “apocalyptic sandwich”. As noted by E.P. Sanders (Jesus and Judaism, 1985, pp. 91-95) and many before him (e.g. Bart Ehrman, James D.G. Dunn and Klaus Koch), Jesus’ position between John the Baptist, for whom the imminent judgement was reportedly central, and the early church as reflected in Paul’s letters, who longed for the apocalyptic παρουσία in their lifetimes, means a Jesus who also expected the apocalypse soon makes most sense.
Of course, Borg has counter arguments to this and other reasons to think Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet, but none that can be said to carry the day (for a summary of his arguments and a rebuttal to each of them, see Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, 1998, pp. 102-113). Despite the rearguard actions of conservative and many progressive Christians, the conception of Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic peasant preacher is accepted in some form by many or even most non-Christian and even some progressive Christian scholars (e.g. Allison). Bart, Ehrman, E.P. Sanders, Paula Fredricksen and many others fully accept this reconstruction of the historical Jesus and, despite a lot of media publicity for their “findings” against an apocalyptic Jesus, the Jesus Seminar scholars have failed to shift the balance toward their alternative.
Of course, one of the strengths of this view of the historical Jesus is that it avoids the problem that plagues so many conceptions of him. It is often noted that reconstructions of the historical Jesus tend to reflect the scholar doing the reconstructing. So Catholic scholars find a Jesus who establishes institutions, iniates sacraments and sets up an ongoing hierarchy of authority. Liberal Christian scholars find a Jesus who preaches social justice and personal improvement. And anti-theistic Jesus Mythicists find a Jesus who was never there at all.
But Jesus as an Jewish apocalyptic prophet does not represent any wish fullfilment by the scholars who hold this view or reflect anything about them or their view of the world. On the contrary, the Apocalypticist Jesus is in many ways quite alien, remote and strange to modern people. He is firmly and often uncomfortably a man of his time. Which is why he is most likely the man who existed.
Further Reading
Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, (1998)
Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (2010)
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999)
Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ (1988)
Robert J. Miller (ed.) The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate (2001)
E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (1985)
E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993)
Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910)
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