The Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Tradition

Part One

I. Introduction

According to Synoptic tradition, the coming of the Kingdom of God was the thematic message of the historical Jesus and the “twelve” apostles or messengers who joined their efforts to his during his lifetime. But what did Jesus and his companions understand the Kingdom of God to mean? The answers given have generally varied with the interests or commitments of those discussing the question. It was only about eighty years ago that critical historians — i.e., those who attempt to weigh the evidence critically or objectively — began to suspect that Jesus may have thought of it in terms of the eschatological beliefs of his Jewish predecessors and contemporaries. There was no single eschatological scheme in first-century Judaism, but there were a number of pervasive motifs: the Age to Come or Messianic Age would be inaugurated by God’s intervention in history, with or without the appearance of a Messiah or messianic figure such as a king from the house of David, “the Son of man,” or Elijah; there would be a time of tribulation or suffering, at the end of which Satan would finally be overthrown; the earth would be transformed after the pattern of the Garden of Eden, man and nature redeemed from the curse of frustration and death; and the righteous would enter this Kingdom of God on earth and share in the messianic banquet and era, while the unrighteous would forever be excluded from it.

The two most important proponents of this interpretation published their findings around the turn of the present century: Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer. In their view, the distinctive feature of Jesus’ eschatological understanding was his conviction that the time for these decisive events had come near: they would be fulfilled in his own lifetime, or at the latest within the lifetime of some of his contemporaries.

At first, this interpretation was thought too alarming, for it called into question both the liberal Protestant image of Jesus as the teacher of timeless (i.e., modern) truths or ethics, and the Catholic and traditional Protestant equation of the historical Jesus with the divine and omniscient Christ of the fourth Gospel and subsequent Christian doctrine. With few exceptions, British and American writers preferred to maintain that Jesus did not look for the imminent onset of the Messianic Age. Instead, most held, he believed and proclaimed that it had already come, if only partially. Many used C. H. Dodd’s term “realized eschatology” to signify this understanding. After some hesitation, German historians generally came to accept the basic position of Weiss and Schweitzer, at least their consensus that Jesus had expected the arrival of the Kingdom in the near future — thus, for instance, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, Hans Windisch. But in this case, what could Jesus’ understanding and message mean to modern men who do not believe that the present world is coming to an end, or that Satan now rules but that God is about to establish His Kingdom on earth? Bultmann proposed that Jesus’ understanding and message should be “demythologized,” i.e., that the “mythological” (first-century Jewish eschatological) aspects should be re-interpreted (or abandoned!) and the central idea expressed in terms of modern categories. For Bultmann, this meant categories drawn from existentialist philosophy; thus he speaks of Jesus’ “understanding of the meaning of existence”3 as the essential matter.

Few Anglo-Saxon critics have been willing to accept Dodd’s claim that for Jesus the Kingdom was virtually entirely present. And few German scholars in or out of Bultmann’s circle have continued to hold that Jesus thought it exclusively future. For the past decade or two, the dominant hypothesis has been that the historical Jesus thought and proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was both future and, in some sense, also present.

The tendency of interpreters to circumvent the evidence that Jesus looked for the coming of the Kingdom in the near future is traceable to the dogmatic interests or presuppositions of these interpreters. Most of the Synoptic evidence indicates unambiguously that Jesus and his followers looked for the coming of the Kingdom in the future. Our contention is that much of the “difficulty” over verses which might appear to indicate that Jesus thought of the Kingdom as present arises out of unwillingness on the part of interpreters to take seriously Jesus’ eschatological outlook.

Jesus regarded the coming of the Kingdom as a future, supernatural occurrence. That he thought it present on earth in any sense is doubtful. It is equally unlikely that any of the Synoptic evangelists or their “sources” (Mark, “Q,” “M,” and “L”)4 thought that the Kingdom of God was yet present or had been present on earth. For the historical Jesus and the Synoptic tradition alike, the Kingdom of God was still to come. The fact that this expectation was fulfilled neither in that generation nor any subsequent to date does not alter the evidence that Jesus and the early Christian community looked for its actualization in the near future.

It is ironic that this problem which was pivotal to the “quest of the historical Jesus,” the “realized eschatology” debate, the “demythologizing controversy,” and to the whole course of NT study in this century has largely escaped the attention of the nonspecialist. Laymen generally suppose that the real problem about the historical Jesus is whether he really existed, at least as described in the Gospel traditions;5 or whether the Dead Sea Scrolls discredit him as a mere echo of the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness; or whether Schonfield (or any other popularizer) has at last proven him some kind of fanatic or political operator.6 These misplaced or spurious concerns have, in part, been fed by the desire of authors and publishers to sell print. But they also result from the failure of NT specialists to expose to public view (and often to their own awareness) the specifically eschatological nature of Jesus’ beliefs and preaching indicated in the Synoptic tradition.

However strange this outlook may seem to us, it is quite characteristic of first-century Judaism and Christianity, and constitutes a basic feature of the context in which the latter developed. Perhaps the present study can serve to introduce the nonspecialist to, and remind the specialist of the eschatological character of, the Kingdom of God in the Synoptic tradition, a factor which must be recognized if one wishes even to begin to comprehend the intention and activity of the historical Jesus and the early Christian community.

II. Eschatology and Methodology

As Albert Schweitzer and more recently others also have shown, the efforts on the part of NT scholars and others prior to 1900 to portray the life and teaching of Jesus were by and large highly subjective and fanciful. In nearly every case, these writers managed to delineate a Jesus in modern dress, devoted to the concerns of modern men, and lending the weight of his good name to their causes — e.g., the furtherance of rational religion, the triumph of the proletariat, the fulfillment of man’s progress toward the perfect society on earth.7 Jesus had apparently been doing well in these modernizing schools, and was advancing toward graduation into the world of respectable, contemporary society. But just when everything was going so well, it was discovered, to nearly everyone’s dismay — including that of the two principal discoverers, Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer — that the modern (late nineteenth-century) Jesus was a figment of liberal theology’s imagination: that the historical Jesus is “to our time a stranger and an enigma,” who returns to his own time.8 So long as Jesus’ eschatological outlook was ignored, it seemed possible, by use of only moderately ingenious exegetics, to find in him the advocate of all sorts of modern-day viewpoints and concerns. But once his eschatological outlook was recognized, it was no longer so easy to claim his endorsement.

It is not surprising that many writers since Schweitzer have been unwilling to surrender their versions of the “historical” Jesus without a struggle. What more powerful ally could one have on behalf of his particular cause than “the Founder” (as many liberal writers preferred to call Jesus) himself? Furthermore, many modern Christian exegetes and moralists remained convinced that Jesus’ message — his gospel and ethics — is still authoritative for and relevant to the Christian life today. Given this conviction, surely Jesus must have intended his message for our day, and not simply for his own generation.9 Furthermore, the eschatological interpretation of Jesus’ outlook and teaching seemed to undermine his authority: if Jesus were mistaken about the time of the coming of the kingdom of God, then perhaps he was in error about some other things as well, such as his relationship to God or the nature of the moral life.10

By far the clearest and most forceful and, incidentally, the first thorough analysis of the Synoptic evidence apropos of Jesus’ concept of the kingdom of God is the first edition of Johannes Weiss’ Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, a slender volume of which Rudolf Bultmann says:

This epoch-making book refuted the interpretation which was hitherto generally accepted. Weiss showed that the Kingdom of God is not immanent in the world and does not grow as part of the world’s history, but is rather eschatological; i.e., the Kingdom of God transcends the historical order. It will come into being not through the moral endeavor of man, but solely through the supernatural action of God. God will suddenly put an end to the world and to history, and He will bring in a new world, the world of eternal blessedness.11

Since this book is now to be available in English, a brief summary of Weiss’ argument will suffice.

The eschatological character of Jesus’ Galilean preaching, Weiss suggests, is evidenced not only in Mark 1:15 and Matthew 4:17, “Repent; the kingdom of God is at hand,” but also in the “Q” summaries which in their earliest form describe Jesus as “preaching the gospel of the kingdom saying: Repent” (Matt. 4:23; 9:35; Luke 4:43; 8:1). He instructs his disciples to proclaim this same message as he sends them on their preaching mission (Matt. 10:7; Luke 10:9, 11): “The meaning of this well-attested proclamation of Jesus and his disciples seems quite clear: the kingdom (or the rule) of God has drawn so near that it stands at the door. Therefore, while the basileia (Kingdom) is not yet here, it is extremely near.”12

The first supplication of the prayer Jesus put on the lips of his disciples, Weiss points out, was “Thy kingdom come!” “The meaning is not ‘may thy kingdom grow,’ ‘may thy kingdom be perfected,’ but, rather, ‘may thy kingdom come.’ For the disciples, the basileia is not yet here, not even in its beginnings; therefore Jesus bids them: zeteite ten basileian (seek the Kingdom; Luke 12:31). This yearning and longing for its coming, this ardent prayer for it, and the constant hope that it will come — that it will come soon — this is their religion.” Only the Father knows when the kingdom will come; there is no way to calculate the time of its arrival — not even the Son knows that (Mark 13:32), but Jesus’ followers can be sure that God will bring it (Luke 12:32; 18:7ff.; 21:28).

Nevertheless, Jesus expected the kingdom to come in the near future. His instructions to his disciples as he sent them on their preaching mission (Matt. 10:5ff.; Luke 10:10ff.) make sense only when we realize that in Jesus’ view no time was to be lost:

In case a town should not receive them, they were immediately and emphatically to abandon all further attempts to approach it and were to shake off its dust from their feet. Such a procedure is anything but “pastoral”…It can only be explained on the supposition that no time may be lost with fruitless or problematical efforts. Where they meet with unresponsiveness, no more energy dare be wasted there which might better be directed toward receptive souls. The expectation of the immediate onset of the end forms the background for these ideas.

At some point, however, Jesus began to realize that the kingdom would not come during his own lifetime. But he still expected it to come during the lifetime of the generation of his contemporaries (Mark 13:30 and par.). In Mark 9:43ff. it “is presupposed that those to whom the words are addressed will live to see the coming of the kingdom,” but first they must pass through the final Judgment. At the time of Judgment, the dead, having been raised, including even those of ancient and foreign cities and nations, will pass before the judgment throne of the Son of man, where the fate of each will be decided: those found righteous will then enter the kingdom of God and sit at the messianic table in the bright warm banquet hall with the patriarchs (Matt. 8:11ff.), while the wicked will suffer exclusion from the kingdom of God.

At the Last Supper, Jesus made it plain to his disciples that he would not again drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God had come (Luke 22:18). But to the meek, he promised that they would inherit the kingdom (Matt. 5:5). When Jesus spoke of “possessing” or “entering” the kingdom of God, he meant, as in the Beatitudes generally, the assurance of participation, and even, perhaps, bearing rule in the kingdom of God at that time in the future when God brings it. The kingdom will belong only to those who by repentance (metanoia) have made themselves ready for it. Weiss does not use Schweitzer’s term, “interim ethic” or “ethic for the interim,” but his interpretation is virtually identical at this point: “the ‘righteousness of the kingdom of God’ does not signify the ethical perfection which members of the kingdom possess or achieve in the kingdom of God, but rather the dikaiosune (righteousness) which is the condition for entrance into the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:20).” One must be prepared to give up everything else for the sake of this highest, ultimate Good, as the parables of the pearl and the treasure in the field make very plain.13

Weiss was quite aware that recognizing the eschatological character of Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God would make it no longer possible to maintain that the words and outlook of the historical Jesus and the late nineteenth-century theological interpretation of Jesus and his message were one and the same. He insists, therefore, that “we cannot any longer use Jesus’ words in the exact sense that was originally intended.”

Weiss noted that his conclusions “present peculiar difficulties for systematic and practical theology”; in particular, the Protestant liberal understanding that the kingdom of God could be interpreted “as an ‘actualization of the rule of God’ by human ethical activity” is now seen to be not only without support from the historical Jesus, but “completely contrary to the transcendentalism of Jesus’ idea.”

What, then, should theology do? It not only could, but should, Weiss urged, retain the concept “kingdom of God” as “the characteristic watchword of modern theology. Only the admission must be demanded that we use it in a different sense from Jesus.’”

Albert Schweitzer’s interpretation of Jesus’ eschatological message and ministry is generally more familiar than Weiss’ and need not be summarized here. It may simply be noted that Schweitzer arrived independently at very much the same conclusions as Weiss, setting down his position initially in his “Sketch of the Life of Jesus,”14 and with some further additions in his celebrated, though often misread, Quest of the Historical Jesus.15 Like Weiss, Schweitzer did not shrink from concluding that the historical, eschatological Jesus is “a stranger and an enigma” to our time, and that, accordingly, “the historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists.”16

Both Weiss and Schweitzer were concerned to show how this strange, eschatological Jesus with his negative, world-renouncing ethic might nevertheless be understood to mean something for our own time.17 Their proposals may have some merit, even though a considerable gap remains between the historical Jesus of their exegesis and the Jesus they found relevant to the modern world. The point to be noted here is that both men were capable of differentiating between the descriptive, historical-critical task and the theological, interpretative task. They did not allow themselves to be forced off the road of straightforward historical exegesis by fear or hallucinations of oncoming theological “difficulties.”

Some of the more recent studies of the Kingdom of God in the Synoptic tradition have not proceeded so forthrightly. In many of them the methodology employed seems to proceed on the principle that the end justifies the means. The implicit end is to get rid of Jesus’ strange, eschatological ideas and, with them, the attendant theological “difficulties” that seem to stand between him and his significance “for us” today.18 To achieve such a worthy goal, surely any means or methodology — if necessary, several at the same time — will do! Diverse as many of these studies are as to specific theological interest, it will be seen that they are guided by the same methodological consideration: to dispose of the eschatological aspects of Jesus’ thought, preaching, and activity.

Footnotes:

* Reprinted, with minor revisions, from The Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Tradition (Introduction and Chaper 1), 1970. Used by permission of the University of Florida Press.

1 The term “Synoptic” refers to the first three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) which, when compared or “looked at together,” are similar or even identical at numerous places, in contrast to the fourth Gospel (John) with which the first three have little in common.

2 The term “eschatology” or “eschatological” as used here refers to the conceptions of the events associated in first-century Jewish and Christian thought with the anticipated end of the present age or world, and the coming or beginning on earth of the Kingdom of God or Messianic Age.

3 Bultmann and many of his pupils also speak of the understanding of existence expressed in or elicited by the kerygma, i.e., the “preaching” or message of the early church. Bultmann gladly relegates the historical Jesus to first-century Judaism (so far as his significance for theology is concerned), but maintains the essential identity of the early Christian kerygma (by which he usually means his rendering of Pauline theology) with the preaching of the church today. The central issue in the so-called new quest of the historical Jesus is the relationship between Jesus’ understanding “of the meaning of existence” and that implicit in the kerygma. Proponents of the “new quest” generally wish to sanctify their conception of the kerygma or the understanding “of the meaning of existence” imputed to it by finding its parallel or basis in the historical Jesus.

4 It is widely recognized that Matthew and Luke both utilized Mark for their narrative framework and certain other material. Sayings that appear in approximately the same form in Matthew and Luke but not occurring in Mark are designated by the letter “Q” for the German Quelle, meaning “source.” Whether such a “source” was oral or written, or even existed, are other questions. The letter “M” designates material found only in Matthew, and “L” what is peculiar to Luke. Some of the “M” or “L” traditions may have come from “Q”; these letters may also include several different subsources and material authored by the evangelists themselves.

5 Few critical scholars, of course, would claim that the Jesus portrayed in the fourth Gospel corresponds to the Jesus of history. By no means all of the Synoptic tradition is to be taken as evidence for the historical Jesus either; but here, at least, there is much that can be so regarded with a high degree of probability, as even so radical a critic as Rudolf Bultmann concedes (Jesus and the Word, New York, 1958, 14).

6 On J.M. Allegro and H.J. Schonfield, see Otto Betz, “The Crisis in N.T. Theology: The Gap between the Historical Jesus and the Faith of the Church,” Chicago Theological Seminary Register 59 (1969), esp. 12-16.

7 Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York, 1950) is still the best summary of these efforts. He writes, retrospectively, of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “lives” of Jesus, “Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus…But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character” (4). These words were also prophetic of many of the treatments yet to come. See also Gösta Lundström, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, Richmond, 1963, Chs. 1-3, 9-11.

8 Schweitzer, 399.

9 This conviction has been a major factor in the resistance of many writers to Schweitzer’s characterization of Jesus’ message as “an ethic for the interim.” See my article “Interim Ethics,” Theology and Life 9 (1966), 220-33.

10 E.g., George E. Ladd, Jesus and the Kingdom, New York, 1964, 136 ff.

11 Jesus Christ and Mythology, New York, 1958, 12. See also the appraisal of Weiss by David Larrimore Holland, “History, Theology and the Kingdom of God,” Biblical Research 13 (1968), 1-13.

12 Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, Göttingen, 1892, 12. The following pages of the same work are also cited in the discussion which follows: 17, 25, 27, 36 ff., 42, 49, 63, 65-67.

13 Matt. 13:44-46. See also Luke 12:31; Matt. 6:31.

14 English translation, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, New York, 1950.

15 Schweitzer’s most recent account of Jesus’ ministry and message was written in 1951: The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity, New York, 1968, esp. 68-130. His position basically is the same here as in his earlier studies.

16 Quest, 399.

17 For analysis of Schweitzer’s suggestions, see my book Jesus and Ethics, Philadelphia, 1968, Chapter 2.

18 Thus, e.g., Heinz Zahrnt, The Historical Jesus, New York, 1963, 53; Hermann Schuster, “Die Konsequente Eschatologie in der Interpretation des Neuen Testaments, Kritisch Betrachtet,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 47 (1956), 22.

Part Two

III. How Scholars Have Disposed of the Eschatological Aspects of Jesus’ View of the Kingdom

Perhaps the simplest method is that demonstrated in B. H. Branscomb, The Teaching of Jesus. Here the author simply ignores the eschatological evidence, and so finds no difficulty in presenting Jesus as founder of the “Kingdom of the heart,” a moral philosopher enunciating virtues and great principles for all generations to come. Various writers, such as C. H. Dodd, strategically bypass inconvenient Synoptic texts; for instance, Dodd nowhere accounts for Matthew 10:23 or Luke 10:12.1 T. W. Manson ignores a whole series of passages that are contrary to his thesis that in the latter phase of his ministry Jesus thought in terms of “realized eschatology.”2 Karl Adam notes that the eschatological interpretation makes much of Mark 9:1, 13:30, and parallels, and promises “an unprejudiced evaluation” of these texts, but then never mentions them again.3 But usually, as in the case of Dodd and Manson, this method is relied upon only in conjunction with other, more sophisticated methods.

E. F. Scott presents a variation: in his earliest study of Synoptic eschatology, The Kingdom and the Messiah, he was still under the influence of Schweitzer’s view that for Jesus the Kingdom of God was entirely future and imminent; but in his later books, he seems to have forgotten (though he does not explicitly repudiate) that understanding, and therefore feels free to describe Jesus as the teacher of permanently valid moral principles, who meant by the term “Kingdom of God” only the life of “inward fellowship with God.”4

Another method is to suggest that some, at least, of the eschatological sayings attributed to Jesus were really put into his mouth by the early church or the evangelists. An early example of this position is George B. Stevens of Yale University, who notes the tendency of preachers and exegetes to evade the plain eschatological meaning of the Synoptic texts: “One can only wonder whether [this procedure] could ever have obtained the consent and advocacy of candid men in any other realm than that of theology.”5 But then Stevens goes on to claim that this plain eschatological teaching was improperly attributed to Jesus by the apostolic church. Few critics attempt to attribute all of the eschatological passages to the church, but some, for instance Hans Windisch and C. H. Dodd, intimate that quite a number of them may be eliminated in this manner.6 It is interesting to notice that a Roman Catholic writer may feel that he is denied this option.

The most immediate explanation of this difficulty would be that the Evangelists, imprisoned in the errors of their age, had read their own false views into Jesus’ words; it might be assumed that the error was not the Lord’s doing, but the Evangelists’. But this interpretation cannot be reconciled with the dogma of inspiration.7

One can appreciate the dilemma of the scholar who wishes to undertake an “unprejudiced evaluation” of the text, but within the limits set by the dogma of an infallible Jesus on one hand, and that of an infallible Bible on the other.

A different line of interpretation is followed by those who state, in effect, that Jesus talked in terms of the eschatological ideas of his contemporaries, but only out of deference to their limited understanding, and that in fact he actually meant something else. This method assumes that Jesus did not really share the eschatological outlook of his contemporaries, but used its terminology to convey to them fragments of truth which they were incapable of understanding in noneschatological categories. Thus E. F. Scott speaks of Jesus’ eschatological language as a “vehicle” for his thought. This language was only symbolic, “little more than figurative.” “Yet in the last resort (Jesus) has broken with the apocalyptic view,” and really understood the Kingdom of God as “a fact of the inward life,” or “fellowship with God.”8

C. H. Dodd describes Jesus’ eschatological imagery as intended only to symbolize “the moral universe,” or “the eternal realities,” or an “order beyond space and time.”9 Amos Wilder speaks of Jesus’ references to the eschatological Kingdom of God as “stylistic,” or symbolic of “ineffable” realities, or as intended to dramatize his message to “simple people.”10 Even Bultmann, who usually gives the impression of knowing better, sometimes describes Jesus as having been first an existentialist preacher of the Will of God, and only afterwards an eschatologist. Eschatology was only “mythology,” the “garments” in which “the real meaning in Jesus’ teaching finds its outward expression,” viz., “that man now stands under the necessity of decision, that his ‘Now’ is always for him the last hour.”11

Bultmann reveals his failure to comprehend the reality and significance for Jesus of the coming eschatological event in his embarrassment over the theological or moral problem of eschatological “rewards” in Jesus’ teaching. Bultmann writes as if there were something extraneous or unseemly (at any rate, un-Lutheran) about Jesus’ attaching the promise (or threat) of eschatological rewards (or punishment) to his proclamation of God’s demand for radical obedience.12 He fails to grasp that if Jesus really believed that the Kingdom of God, the Son of man, and the Judgment were near — whether in a few weeks or a few years — it would not have been a question of “rewards,” but of responding in the face of this decisive event in such a way as to have some hope of surviving Judgment and entering the Kingdom. This Kingdom is coming. Will men be found penitent, faithful, fit for entering it? Bultmann puts the cart before the horse when he describes Jesus as demanding radical obedience and then, in order to motivate compliance with this radical ethic of neighbor-love, adding the sanctions of rewards and punishments. Bultmann falls into the trap described by Schweitzer in 1901: “So long as one starts with the ethics and seeks to comprehend the eschatology as something adventitious, there appears to be no organic connection between the two.”13 Wilder’s distinction between “formal” and “essential” sanctions similarly begins with Jesus’ ethics, but ends in a disjunction between ethics and eschatology.

Several writers feel that the eschatological interpretation — and with it, presumably, the eschatological passages it explains — should be disposed of more emphatically. The tone is that of indignation. The method is that of sarcasm or reductio ad absurdum. The presupposition is that Jesus had divine foreknowledge of the future, or, at any rate, was not so unreasonable (i.e., so unlike us) as actually to have “swallowed uncritically the contents of the Jewish messianic hope.”14 “Even if Jesus used at times some of the imagery of the apocalyptists, and even though he shares some of their underlying ideas, yet he never identified the Kingdom of God with any of these dreams.”15 Jesus could not possibly have been guided by what to us is so obviously a “fantastic delusion.”16 Nothing about the Sermon on the Mount has the “burning odor of the cosmic catastrophe,” writes Bornkamm.17 Schweitzer is often accused of having described Jesus as “fanatical” or “deluded”;18 hence his interpretation can be readily dismissed, since Jesus, whether seen from the perspective of conservative or liberal theology, of course, was not deluded! Schweitzer nowhere describes Jesus as a fanatic or “deluded,” however, and in his M.D. dissertation, Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu, points out numerous fundamental errors, both historical-critical and psychoanalytical, in certain interpretations which so described Jesus.

Another method used in attacking the eschatological meaning can be designated simply as devious or forced exegesis. For example, Herman Ridderbos, noting the unfavorable connotation of the term “this generation,” concludes, speaking of Mark 13:30 and parallels, that “we must not attribute a temporal meaning” to these words, but rather “must conceive of it” as referring to people of any age whose “disposition and frame of mind…are averse to Jesus and his words.” Similarly, he argues that Matthew 23:39 (Luke 13:35) and Mark 14:62 (Matt. 26:64) are to be thought of as addressed to the Jewish people and their leaders generally, “without inferring…that the latter would witness the parousia of the Son of Man before their deaths.”19

A classic example of devious exegesis is C. H. Dodd’s proposed translation and interpretation of Mark 9:1. “The bystanders are not promised that they shall see the Kingdom of God coming, but that they shall come to see that the Kingdom of God has already come, at some point before they became aware of it.”20 Perrin furnishes a similar instance of eisegesis: of the petition “Thy Kingdom come,” he writes:

we must remember that those who are being taught to use this petition are those for whom the Kingdom is already a matter of personal experience. They are therefore either being taught to pray that others may share this experience; or, more probably, they are being taught to pray for the consummation of that which has begun within their experience.21

A more subtle type of methodology is pursued by most of the more recent NT critics, who concede that Jesus both talked eschatologically and really meant what he said; and yet, in one way or another, they undertake to show that Jesus really meant something else as well in speaking of the Kingdom, and that the modern reader should pay attention only to that something else. Tacitly they permit the eschatological Kingdom of God to fall into the background, and, if possible, drop completely out of sight.

Harnack develops the prototype of this method in his Das Wesen des Christentums.22 Jesus did share the eschatological outlook of his contemporaries, Harnack admits, but at the same time held a radically different notion about the essential meaning of the Kingdom of God. To him, it really meant personal religious experience: “God and the soul; the soul and its God,” the “Rule of God in the hearts of men.” How did Jesus manage to hold such irreconcilable notions simultaneously? Harnack’s answer was straightforward if incredible: Jesus simply failed to perceive the contradiction, though it is obvious to us. We should think only of what was “peculiar” or essential in Jesus’ message, and forget the “dramatic” and “external” aspects which he “simply shared with his contemporaries.” “From this point of view,” the eschatological understanding of the Kingdom of God “has vanished.”23 The essence of this procedure is to permit one’s eyes to focus only upon the noneschatological meaning attributed to Jesus’ words about the Kingdom of God. After a while one will hardly even notice the theologically inconvenient, eschatological Kingdom of God. It simply vanishes, or “pales into insignificance.”24

Hans Windisch utilizes this kind of methodology in his study on The Sermon on the Mount. He grants that Jesus expected the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. But at the same time, Windisch points to a class of proverbial or “wisdom” sayings of Jesus, which make no explicit reference to impending eschatological events. These sayings were not conditioned by Jesus’ eschatological outlook, and so are to be regarded, along with such other sayings as can be freed from the eschatological context, as laws to be obeyed literally by Christians in all ages. Windisch does not even find any particular difficulty in regarding the eschatologically conditioned sayings as laws for the modern Christian life. Jesus may have meant them for his own generation in the interim before the coming of the Kingdom of God; but Windisch does not hesitate to regard them as intended for the modern Christian as well.25 Windisch then poses for himself the artificial task of constructing from various “hints” contained in the Sermon on the Mount a theory as to how Christians, who are required by Jesus to obey his impossible laws, may nevertheless hope for salvation. In effect, he ignores the eschatological context of Jesus’ sayings, both by isolating certain noneschatological sayings, and by regarding all the others as well as “intended for” the present age. He sees Jesus as the giver of eternally valid laws, whereas Harnack sees him as the discoverer and advocate of certain timeless or eternally valid ideas or values. The methodology, however, is substantially the same.

Rather than maintain that Jesus held simultaneously that the Kingdom of God was future and imminent, and at the same time present and immanent, T. W. Manson suggests that during the early part of his ministry, Jesus thought of it as future; but then, after Peter’s recognizing him at Caesarea Philippi as the Christ, Jesus began to speak of it as present, both in his own person and ministry and as the “Reign of God,” a “personal relation between God and the individual” which men could enter at any time, rather than as an event or place in time or space.26 But Manson can maintain his two-phase theory only by ignoring the numerous references to the future and imminent appearance of the Kingdom of God which are to be found in the Synoptic tradition following Caesarea Philippi.

Furthermore, Manson is unwilling to permit the conclusion that Jesus could actually have been mistaken in proclaiming the Kingdom of God as a coming eschatological event even during the early part of his ministry, and often writes as if Jesus regarded the Kingdom of God as present throughout the whole of his ministry.

Amos Wilder, like Harnack and Manson, proposes that Jesus regarded the Kingdom of God both as a future eschatological event, and as present in his own person and ministry. And like theirs, Wilder’s “both-and” is ultimately reduced to an “either-or”: he quietly forgets about the future-eschatological conception, and leaves the reader, in the final analysis, with only realized eschatology. “Interim ethics” is eliminated in favor of “the ethics of the realized Kingdom of God.”

Perhaps the most popular recent variation on Harnack’s methodology for disposing of Jesus’ futuristic eschatological outlook proceeds with the assertion that, for Jesus, time had no real significance. It is not surprising to find the British Platonist proponent of realized eschatology, C. H. Dodd, arguing:

There is no coming of the Son of Man in history ‘after’ His coming in Galilee and Jerusalem, whether soon or late, for there is no before and after in the eternal order. The Kingdom of God in its full reality is not something which will happen after other things have happened.27

It is strange that Bultmann describes Jesus as maintaining that the necessity of decision is the “essential characteristic” of humanity, that “every hour is the last hour.” This being the case, “we can understand that for Jesus the whole contemporary mythology is pressed into the service of this conception of human existence.”28 Other theologians, including Hans Conzelmann, have followed Bultmann’s lead in trying to eliminate the category of time (and thus also futuristic eschatology) from Jesus’ outlook.29

Another recent statement of this position is provided by Heinz Zahrnt:

So closely is the coming of the Kingdom of God bound up with the appearance of Jesus that there is ‘no more time’ between his present proclamation and the final dawning of the Kingdom. There is no room for any further event or any other saving figure.30

From this perspective, one might say with Harnack, the eschatological understanding “has vanished.” But however worthy the motives of these interpreters may be, their declaration that for Jesus and his disciples time had no meaning is guided entirely by dogmatic considerations and is not supported by the Synoptic evidence.

The fact that many of the recent studies in Synoptic eschatology generally tend toward the elimination or de-emphasizing of the eschatological Kingdom of God is a sure sign of dogmatic interest. The studies by Kümmel, Ridderbos, Lundström, Perrin, and Ladd are, for the most part, straightforward, historical-critical examinations of the Synoptic evidence and extremely useful critical summaries of the ways in which it has been interpreted since Weiss’ monumental volume appeared in 1892. All five find that some of the Synoptic texts unmistakably show that Jesus thought of the Kingdom of God as a future eschatological event, but that other Synoptic passages point toward the conclusion that Jesus also thought of the Kingdom of God as in some sense already present. There is nothing devious in the methodology of these recent studies up to this point.

But then toward the last chapter or in the last part of a decisive chapter 31 even these writers begin to intimate that the significance of Jesus’ teaching should, after all, be seen primarily in the sense of its present reality. Here, the significance perceived seems to vary directly with the theological and philosophical commitments of the interpreter. For Ridderbos, Jesus’ conception of the present Kingdom of God comes out inextricably associated with Christology;32 for Perrin, with “religious experience.”33 It has been noted that for Bultmann, Jesus’ eschatological preaching comes down to the proclamation of the eternal “Now” of decision.

In terms of methodology, many of the studies written since 1990 have shown little improvement over Harnack’s. True, they do not suppose that the eschatological interpretation and evidence can be disposed of as quickly or completely as Harnack did. What is basically different is that instead of seeing a Protestant “liberal” face at the bottom of the well of history, each sees in the historical Jesus the reflection of his own particular theological milieu: Manson and Dodd, a benign (British) Platonic moralist; Ridderbos, a moderately conservative (Dutch) Evangelical Christologist; Bultmann, a (Lutheran) existentialist moral theologian. Everyone forces the Kingdom of God violently into his own theological tradition.

The fundamental methodological error in a great many studies of Synoptic eschatology in this century has been to begin and proceed with the assumption — sometimes perhaps not even recognized — that one must, somehow or other, dispose of the evidence that Jesus thought and spoke of the Kingdom of God as a coming eschatological event.34 A variety of devious procedures, calculated in some way or another to eliminate or obscure the eschatological character of Jesus’ preaching and outlook, seem to follow inevitably in the wake of this basic a priori error. This error itself seems to stem from two sources. On the one hand, there is the desire to avoid the theological difficulties (whether for liberal or conservative faith) supposedly inherent in the eschatological interpretation: for instance, the possibility that Jesus was limited or mistaken in his knowledge of the future course of history, that he might not have intended his teaching as a series of ethical principles or ideals for the guidance of men during all following centuries, or his church as a permanent institution. Since Jesus’ teaching and his church are perceived by the Christian to be sources of direction for the life of the Christian community today, it seems much more reasonable to suppose that Jesus intended them to be so.

A second source of error seems to arise out of the desire to achieve a consistent or unitary, rather than an equivocal, conclusion to the question. Since the proponents of the view that Jesus thought of the Kingdom of God as both future event and present reality have nothing very satisfactory to suggest by way of explaining how the Kingdom of God could have been for Jesus both present and at the same time future, it seems more reasonable or logical to retain the one and explain away the other (or simply forget about it). Thus the methodologically sound “both-and” is reduced to the seemingly logical or more consistent present or realized eschatology by an act of legerdemain.35 It is significant that what is usually disposed of is the theologically embarrassing futuristic evidence, while the relatively scanty and problematical evidence which might be construed in favor of “realized” eschatology is given full play.

What is suggested here is only the obvious: the need for distinguishing between the historical-critical task of describing Jesus’ conception of the Kingdom of God, and the theological task of interpreting the difficulties raised by historical criticism and indicating the way or ways in which the Jesus of history, his ideas, words and deeds, may mean something for the life of faith in the modern world. When the critical task is carried out with too much concern for the theological difficulties that may result, the temptation arises to make the theological task less difficult by eliminating — through seemingly critical analysis — some of the offending evidence.

It may be implied here that theology has some unfinished business on its agenda: it has yet to come to terms with the implications of Jesus’ eschatological beliefs, message, and activity for contemporary faith and ethics. But that is another assignment. Here it is our hope that by asking the right questions — based on the assumptions of the first century rather than our own — we can at least recognize the intention and meaning of these traditions for those who first gave them currency.

* Reprinted, with minor revisions, from The Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Tradition (Introduction and Chaper 1), 1970. Used by permission of the University of Florida Press.

1 See Gösta Lundström, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, Richmond, 1963, 121.

2 For instance, Mark 10:23; 14:25 (= Luke 22:18); Luke 10:9, 11; 12:35-48; 19:11-26.

3 The Christ of Faith, New York, 1960, 314.

4 The Kingdom of God in the New Testament, New York, 1931, 186.

5 “Is There a Self-consistent New Testament Eschatology?” American Journal of Theology 6 (1902), 67.

6 Windisch, The Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, Philadelphia, 1950, 26; C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, rev. ed., New York, 1961, 138 ff.

7 Adam, 320.

8 Kingdom of God, 82, 95; cf. 110.

9 The Gospel in the New Testament, London, n.d., 29; Parables, 40, 83. For a critique of Dodd see C. C. McCown, “Symbolic Interpretation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 63 (1944), 335-38.

10 Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus, New York, 1950, 60, 89, 113. For appraisal of Wilder, see C. Freeman Sleeper, “Some American Contributions to New Testament Interpretation,” Interpretation 20 (1966), 329-37.

11 Jesus and the Word, New York, 1958, 55 ff., 131; “Jesus and Paul,” in Existence and Faith, New York, 1960, 186. See also Paul Schubert, “The Synoptic Gospels and Eschatology,” Journal of the Bible and Religion 14 (1946), 156.

12 Jesus and the Word, 79, 121; Theology of the New Testament, New York, 1954, 14 ff.

13 The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, New York, 1950, 51 ff.

14 T.W. Manson, “Realized Eschatology and the Messianic Secret,” in G. E. Nineham, ed., Studies in the Gospels, Oxford, 1955, 210.

15 Dodd, Gospel, 19 (emphasis mine).

16 Adam, 67. See the review of such interpretations in Norman Perrin, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, Philadelphia, 1963, 51, 150.

17 Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, London, 1960, 223. See Leander E. Keck’s excellent criticism, “Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth Revisited,” Journal of Religion 49 (1969), esp. 11 ff.

18 E.g., Hugh Anderson, “The Historical Jesus and the Origins of Christianity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 13 (1960), 13; James Kallas, Jesus and the Power of Satan, Philadelphia, 1968, 69; Howard C. Kee, Jesus in History, New York, 1970, 17 ff.

19 The Coming of the Kingdom, Philadelphia, 1962, 502 ff.

20 Parables, 37, fn. 1. This interpretation is reflected in the NEB’s translation of Mark 9:1. NEB translators also show a penchant for realized eschatology in rendering several other verses, e.g., Matt. 12:28 = Luke 11:20; Mark 1:15; Matt. 3:2; 4:17; 10:7; 21:31; Luke 17:21. The director of the NEB Committee was C.H. Dodd!

21 Kingdom of God, 193.

22 English translation, What Is Christianity? New York, 1957.

23 Ibid., 54 ff. (emphasis mine).

24 Adam, The Christ of Faith, 316. Though a conservative Catholic theologian, Adam’s treatment of Jesus’ eschatological understanding often resembles Harnack’s.

25 Sermon on the Mount, 101, 172 ff.

26 The Teaching of Jesus, Cambridge, 1951, 124-29, 135.

27 Parables, 83.

28 Jesus and the Word, 51 ff.

29 E.g., Hans Conzelmann, “Jesus Christus,” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart III (1959), 644. See Lundström, Kingdom of God, 127 ff.

30 The Historical Jesus, New York, 1963, 113.

31 W.G. Kümmel, Promise and Fulfillment, Studies in Biblical Theology no. 23, London, 1957, 151-55; Perrin, Kingdom of God, 185 ff.; Ladd, Jesus and the Kingdom, 144, 213. Even Lundström, who insists that “The Kingdom of God is absolutely eschatological” and that its “purely future quality…should be clearly emphasized” (Kingdom of God, 232 ff.), concludes that for Jesus and the faithful who see it concentrated but hidden in Jesus, his sayings and miracles, the Kingdom of God has come. What is yet to come is not the Kingdom of God, but its “power and glory” (234 ff., 238).

32 Coming of the Kingdom, xxv, 76, 127, 230, 232, 527.

33 Kingdom of God, 186, 190 ff., 203.

34 There have been notable exceptions, of course: besides Weiss and Schweitzer, there are Walter E. Bundy, Millar Burrows, Martin Dibelius, Morton S. Enslin, Robert M. Grant, Erich Grässer, A. H. M’Neile, W. Manson, and Krister Stendahl, to name only some of the most prominent.

35 Of those critics who maintain a “both-and” position, Kümmel does so most successfully: Promise and Fulfillment; “Futuristic and Realized Eschatology in the Earliest Stages of Christianity,” Journal of Religion 43 (1963), 303-14. But the precise sense in which Kümmel understands Jesus to have thought the Kingdom present is unclear. This difficulty obtains also in Bornkamm, Jesus, and Zahrnt, Historical Jesus. Balance is maintained fairly well also by Floyd V. Filson, “The Kingdom; Present and Future,” Journal of the Bible and Religion 7 (1939), 59-63, and Rudolf Otto, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, London, 1943.

by Richard H. Hiers