The Eschatological Jesus

034

Albert Schweitzer, after reviewing the 19th century’s quest for the historical Jesus, believed that honest scholars must choose between two alternatives, between what he called thoroughgoing eschatology^a and thoroughgoing skepticism. By this he meant that either Jesus lived in the same imaginative world as early Jewish apocalypses,^b like 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch, or that we know next to nothing about him.¹

Since Schweitzer, most critical scholars have embraced the eschatological option. They have believed that Jesus expected God to put an end to the normal course of things by raising the dead, judging the world and transforming the earth so that the divine will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. These critical scholars have also believed that for Jesus this eschatological metamorphosis was near to hand.

Recently, however, several prominent scholars have rejected Schweitzer’s dichotomy.² They deny that Jesus thought something like a millennial kingdom, or the rabbinic “world to come,” was just around the corner, and yet they do not give up the quest for the historical Jesus. They contend, rather, that earlier scholars made two big mistakes: First, those earlier scholars attributed to Jesus eschatological texts that should instead be attributed to the early Church; second, they misinterpreted other texts that did originate with Jesus.

As an illustration of the first error, many now doubt that Jesus uttered any of the sayings in which the “Son of Man” plays a role in the last judgment.^c Mark 8:38 (“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels”) and related texts are thought to have been created by Christians after the crucifixion. There is said to be no convincing evidence that “Son of Man” was a recognizable title for a messianic figure among Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries, so Jesus could not have used it. The appellation was rather 036created by Jesus’ followers and applied to him on the basis of a Christian interpretation of Daniel 7:13–14. On this view of things, if Jesus did utter “Son of Man,” as most scholars think he did on at least a few occasions, he was only using a common Aramaic idiom to refer to himself in a roundabout fashion.³ The expression had nothing to do with the last things.

As for the second error, some now say that Jesus’ sayings about the kingdom or rule of God have been roundly misunderstood. We have wrongly assumed that the kingdom Jesus refers to—the central theme of his proclamation—was an imminent eschatological kingdom. This common assumption may seem to be an obvious inference from Mark 14:25 (“I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God”). But the authenticity of these words is now disputed, and there are other texts that clearly indicate Jesus was speaking of the kingdom as already present. Matthew 12:28 (and the parallel passage in Luke 11:20), for instance, declares that “the kingdom has [already] come to you,” and Luke 17:20–21 says that “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 you.” John Dominic Crossan and others have urged that Jesus proclaimed a sapiential kingdom,^d one having to do with living under God’s power and rule in the here and now.

Two catalysts in particular have disturbed the old consensus regarding Jesus and eschatology and encouraged the new position. The first was the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas,^e part of the Nag Hammadi library. This extra-canonical collection of Jesus’ sayings, which seems in part independent of the canonical Gospels, was composed sometime between the middle of the first century C.E. and the middle of the second century C.E. So it is relatively early. Moreover, it does not contain a single saying about the eschatological Son of Man. Nor does this gospel give any sense that the world is about to undergo an eschatological transformation. Almost 30 years ago, Helmut Koester proposed that Thomas reflects a very early stage of the Jesus tradition, one which had not yet been touched by the apocalyptic expectation of the Son of Man.⁴ In other words, Thomas gives reason to suppose that the sayings in the Jesus tradition promoting apocalyptic eschatology are secondary—in short, not authentic words of Jesus.

A second catalyst of the new picture of Jesus has been the discussion of the compositional history of Q, the hypothetical document used by both Matthew and Luke.^f Several recent contributors to the discussion have decided that the earliest, or at least an early, version of Q contained no apocalyptic Son of Man sayings, and that the eschatological pathos present in Q as it was known to Matthew and Luke was a secondary development.⁵ If true, this result would obviously be consistent with the theory that later Christian tradition, without help from Jesus, was responsible for the eschatological character of so much of the Gospels.

But there are problems. Some would hesitate to put much confidence in the hypothetical compositional history of a hypothetical document. Others, including myself, would offer alternative histories of Q that do not eliminate a strong eschatological element from the earliest stratum.

For the sake of argument, however, let us grant that the earliest Q was indeed empty of eschatological feeling. What follows? Probably very little. One can readily imagine that the initial compiler of Q had interests different from the compiler of some later, expanded edition of Q. If we were envisaging a documentary history that spanned generations, then an earlier contributor would certainly be in a 037privileged position. Q, however, was composed within, at most, a thirty- or forty-year period after the crucifixion. Accordingly, one might even suppose that the enlarged version of Q, by virtue of additional, authentic material, resulted in a fuller and less distorted impression of the historical Jesus.

Beyond this, nearly everyone who has said anything about the historical Jesus has used material from Mark, even though Mark appeared later than Q. Scholars have also drawn upon material unique to Matthew and Luke, even though those two gospels followed both Q and Mark. So it does not seem that the initial, original nature of Q should settle the issue of Jesus and eschatology.

Similar reasoning applies to the Gospel of Thomas. Whatever its compositional history may be, one has no difficulty surmising that its final redactor had no place for sayings promoting an apocalyptic eschatology. The truth, as Koester has remarked, is that “the Gospel of Thomas presupposes, and criticizes, a tradition of the eschatological sayings of Jesus.”⁶ This being so, Thomas shows only that competing interpretations existed at an early date. It does not tell us which of those interpretations was congruent with Jesus himself.

There is yet another reason for questioning the old consensus, that Jesus was an eschatological figure. Contemporary work on the Jesus tradition has plausibly urged that Jesus was a teacher of subversive Wisdom,^g an aphorist, a creator of sapiential sayings. This matters for us because Wisdom texts are about coping with the present whereas apocalyptic texts reject the present in the hope of a better future. Here, we seem to have two different ways of looking at the world: If Jesus saw things through the Wisdom tradition, is it not natural to intuit that he did not also see them through the apocalyptic tradition? Marcus Borg has expressed himself thus. So has David Seeley: “There is an obvious tension between a view based on the continuing flow of the 038natural order and another which threatens the abrogation of life as we know it.”⁷

But couldn’t Jesus the eschatological prophet also have uttered provocative one-liners and lived partly in the Wisdom tradition? As historians of Second Temple Judaism are well aware, significant connections run between Wisdom literature and the apocalypses.⁸ Further, a strong eschatological interest—the expectation of the coming kingdom—is combined with Wisdom materials in Daniel, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Synoptic Gospels, the letters of Paul and James, and the Didache. So why not also Jesus? That Jesus may have been concerned with both the here-and-now and the apocalypse is no more surprising than the fact that the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls produced both detailed community rules and detailed eschatological visions. Can’t the subversive and often unconventional wisdom of the Jesus tradition and the eschatological expectation function similarly—namely, to undo the status quo?

Given the inconclusive nature of the arguments so far considered, it is no surprise that the old consensus still has its vigorous supporters. Declarations of its death or of its replacement by a new consensus are premature. John Meier,⁹ E.P. Sanders,¹⁰ and Geza Vermes,¹¹ for instance, have recently written volumes in which Jesus looks much more like Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Jesus than like the Jesus Seminar’s Cynic-Sage.¹² Many of us in fact remain confident that the eschatological Jesus must be the historical Jesus. Here are some reasons why.

It would require Herculean doubt not to believe that several pre-Easter followers of Jesus, soon after his crucifixion, did indeed declare: “God raised Jesus from the dead.” Upon this fact the canonical Gospels, traditions in Acts, and the letters of Paul all concur. If we do not know this, we know nothing.

Now to proclaim a man’s vindication by “the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 4:2; compare Romans 1:4) was to proclaim the occurrence of an eschatological event. There is no evidence that Christians ever understood Jesus’ resurrection to be a resuscitation or return to earthly life (contrast the story of the raising of Lazarus in John 11:38–44). Jesus’ resurrection was, if we can trust the sources, always 039conceived as an entrance into heavenly glory. But to say this, to say that God had raised somebody from the dead, was to claim that God had already begun to do what he had formerly been expected to do only at history’s culmination.¹³

Why do we have texts that associate Jesus’ post-mortem vindication with language traditionally reserved for the consummation of the end of days, language implying the onset of this end? Why not rather texts announcing the heavenly vindication of Jesus’ spirit, or declaring his future resurrection from the dead, or interpreting Jesus as an angel who only appeared to die before he returned to heaven, or using terms linked with the heavenly assumptions of earlier Jewish heroes such as Enoch and Elijah and Moses?

One very good answer is that several influential people came to their post-Easter experiences with certain categories and expectations already fixed, that they had envisaged the general resurrection to be imminent. This would explain why Jesus’ vindication was interpreted not as an isolated event but as the onset of the consummation. As anyone familiar with the sociology of messianic movements knows, every effort is usually made to clothe the unfolding of events with material ready to hand. Schweitzer saw the truth: “The psychologist will say that the ‘resurrection experiences,’ however they may be conceived, are only intelligible as based upon the expectation of the resurrection, and this again as based on references of Jesus to the resurrection.”¹⁴

According to Rudolf Bultmann, “The earliest Church regarded itself as the Congregation of the end of days.”¹⁵ Sanders has gone so far as to say that “the most certain fact of all is that early Christianity was an eschatological movement.”¹⁶ I would hesitate to express myself so categorically, and others might counter that Sanders’s generalization posits a questionable unity at the beginning of Christianity. Should we not rather speak of “early Christianities”? Nonetheless, passages from a wide variety of texts leave little doubt that many early followers of Jesus thought the eschatological climax to be near.^h

041

In the post-Easter period, there clearly were Jesus people who believed that “the ends of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10:11). In the pre-Easter period, Jesus was associated with John the Baptist, whose public speeches, if the Synoptics are any guide at all, featured frequent allusions to the eschatological judgment, conceived as imminent. According to Matthew 3 and Luke 3, John warned people “to flee from the wrath to come,” asserted that “even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees,” prophesied a baptism “with fire,” solemnly affirmed that the winnowing fan of judgment was about to clear the threshing floor, and spoke of “He who is coming after me.”

The direction of this is unambiguous, for Jesus himself was baptized by John. Further, we should not doubt that Jesus had very positive things to say about his baptizer.¹⁷ Obviously, then, there must have been significant ideological continuity between the two men. So to reconstruct a Jesus who did not have a strong eschatological orientation entails unexpected discontinuity not only between Jesus and certain early Christians but also between Jesus and John the Baptist—that is, discontinuity with the movement out of which Jesus came as well as with the movement that came out of him. Is the presumption not against this?

The Synoptic Gospels contain statements that almost certainly regard the eschatological kingdom of God as near in time:

Truly, I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God has come with power.

Mark 9:1

Truly, I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

Mark 13:30

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.

Matthew 10:23

The Synoptics also contain parables admonishing people to watch for the coming of the Lord or of the Son of Man,¹⁸ pronouncements of eschatological woes on contemporaries,¹⁹ and miscellaneous traditions that announce or presuppose that the final fulfillment of God’s saving work is nigh.²⁰

If Jesus uttered just one of these sayings, then Schweitzer was probably in truth’s vicinity. But even if they were all created by the early Church—a prospect that might encourage one to embrace the “thoroughgoing skepticism” he spoke of—that is not sufficient reason to deny an apocalyptic outlook to Jesus. That some Christians believed one thing is no reason to hold that Jesus believed something else. Is it not more likely that Christians felt free to compose eschatological sayings and add them to the tradition because they thought them in accord with Jesus’ message?

No one would dispute that many first-century Jews were indeed “looking forward to the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25), or that this consolation was often conceived as an eschatological transformation of the world, or that this transformation was sometimes spoken of as the “kingdom (of God).” So when we find that the Jesus tradition links the “kingdom (of God)” with eschatological sayings and imagery,²¹ is it not natural to suppose that for Jesus himself the kingdom had strong eschatological associations?ⁱ

Finally, despite its moral focus, the Jesus tradition fails, in Sanders’s words, to offer “concrete planning for achieving any sort of change.” This very strongly implies that if Jesus “hoped for change at all, he must have relied upon God,” that is, “looked for a divine miracle that would be decisive.”²²

For me, it still seems more likely than not, despite recent protests, that Jesus and those around him held strong eschatological hopes that they believed would soon be realized. It admittedly remains difficult to fill out the particulars. Did Jesus look forward to the ingathering of scattered Israel into the holy land? Did he expect a new Temple to replace the old one? Did he anticipate changes in 054nature? I’m not sure.

It is also very difficult to know what Christian theology should make of Jesus’ hopes. Is it fair to view his prophetic language as, in our terms, “mythological”? Can his mistaken expectations be attributed to his true humanity? Or do they require a revision of traditional dogma? Whatever our answers, we cannot be rid of the questions, for we have not rid ourselves of the eschatological Jesus.

Albert Schweitzer, after reviewing the 19th century’s quest for the historical Jesus, believed that honest scholars must choose between two alternatives, between what he called thoroughgoing eschatologya and thoroughgoing skepticism. By this he meant that either Jesus lived in the same imaginative world as early Jewish apocalypses,b like 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch, or that we know next to nothing about him.1 Since Schweitzer, most critical scholars have embraced the eschatological option. They have believed that Jesus expected God to put an end to the normal course of things by raising the dead, judging the world and transforming the […]