The Apocalyptic Jesus: Answering Three Common Objections

Did Jesus Really Think the End was Nigh?

In a previous post, I sketched seven reasons why scholars consider Jesus to be an apocalyptic prophet, expecting the imminent consummation of God’s Kingdom.

But this is not the only view of Jesus’ eschatology on the table. So in this post, I answer some common objections to the modern paradigm of Jesus research.

Response 1: Did Jesus Really Preach the Imminent End?

One popular objection is to argue that Jesus taught that the Kingdom was already here. Thus, while there is certainly material in the Gospels which suggest an imminent end, this should be attributed to the early Church rather than Jesus himself.

In support of this view, there are a number of sayings in the Gospels which suggest that the Kingdom had already arrived – what C.H. Dodd called the Gospels’ ‘inaugurated eschatology.’ For example, Jesus teaches, ‘if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you’ (Lk. 11:20; cf. 17:20-21).

Yet it must be noted that these teachings are not inconsistent with the view that Jesus expected the imminent end. The book of Daniel, for example, talks about the Kingdom of God as an eternal reality, in some sense already here (4:33) as well something still to come (2:44). Thus, the strong sense of the Kingdom as having already arrived in Jesus’ ministry need not be set against the evidence of its imminent consummation.

Another argument is that the earliest Jesus tradition is non-apocalyptic. This view was taken by the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who supposed that the earliest layer of ‘Q’ and the Gospel of Thomas supply our best sources for the historical Jesus. Notably, these sources present him not as an apocalyptic prophet but a wise sage.

The problem here is methodological. The idea that that we can reliably excavate and should then privilege an earliest ‘layer’ in the already–hypothetical Q, or that we should date the Gospel of Thomas earlier than the Synoptics, is spurious at best. Many place the (markedly non-Jewish) apocryphal text well into the second century.

The common flaw with these proposals, however, is that they assume that Jesus’ followers came to radically misunderstand his message early on. Since the expectation of the imminent end is present in Paul and others, those who deny it are left to suppose that they got Jesus wrong, but we (two thousand years on) got him right.

Response 2: Is it about the Transfiguration or Crucifixion?

Another argument is to suppose that the Kingdom did come in the generation of Jesus’ disciples, but that we have misconstrued what its arrival looks like. It is not the end of the world proper, but a more local event.

One common candidate for the Kingdom-come is Jesus’ transfiguration. This is because Jesus’ claim that ‘some of you standing here will not taste death before the Kingdom comes in power’ is placed in Mark immediately before the transfiguration, where he is revealed to his ‘inner ring’ as the divine Son of God.

Another candidate is Jesus’ crucifixion. In Mark, Jesus’ death is presented as a parody of the Roman Triumph, in which he is – quite literally – lifted up and proclaimed as God’s son. For Michael Bird, this is the moment the Kingdom came in power.

There are two reasons why these readings are unnatural. On the one hand, neither accords with traditional expectations of what it would mean for the Kingdom to come. As the disciples ask Jesus even after these events, ‘Now will you restore the Kingdom to Israel?’ The coming Kingdom was not seen in such parochial terms.

On the other hand, it is bizarre for Jesus to claim that some of his audience would not taste death until the Kingdom has come, only to bring the Kingdom moments later. This quite effectively rules out the referent of the coming Kingdom as the transfiguration. Indeed, I think it reasonably precludes any event during his life.

Response 3: Is it Fulfilled in the Temple’s Destruction?

This leaves us with a more promising candidate for the Kingdom’s fulfilment, namely the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE (which I have also discussed here).

In the view of one prominent scholar, N.T. Wright, the ‘coming’ of the ‘Son of Man’ in Mark 13 refers to his going into heaven, not to his parousia or second coming. This ‘coming’ happened in 70 CE because Jesus was vindicated in prophesying the Temple’s destruction. Thus, Wright thinks Jesus’ claim that ‘all these things’ (including the Son of Man’s coming) occurred, as the text says, within a generation.

This is an attractive position, because the destruction of the Temple did occur almost exactly forty years after Jesus’ death. Moreover, Wright is correct to note that the coming of the ‘Son of Man’ in Daniel 7:13 is his approach towards the ‘Ancient of Days’ – it does not seem to envisage the Son of Man coming down to earth.

I am not confident, however, that the coming of the Son of Man can be equated with the Temple’s destruction. There are two major problems with this, in addition to the fact that there is nothing in the text which explicitly gives readers this impression.

The first is that Mark clearly distinguishes the Temple’s destruction and the Son of Man’s return in chronological terms. It describes the former as occurring and shortly after the latter (13.28). This is a rather strange way to speak if Wright’s view is correct, and the Son of Man’s ‘coming’ occurred at the destruction of the Temple.

The second is that the destruction of the Temple was a local event. But the coming of the Son of Man is depicted in all three Synoptic Gospels as a global one. This is implied in way that Mark has spoken of the Son of Man’s judgement (cf. 8:38) and is the association of the ‘coming’ Kingdom in contemporary texts (e.g. T. Mos. 1, 3-5).

In sum, it does not seem as though the destruction of the Temple should be equated with the Son of Man’s coming. One is very hard-pressed to say that Jesus’ expectations were fulfilled by the Temple’s destruction or any single event during his ministry.

Biting the Bullet of Jesus’ Apocalypticism

In this post, we have tried out three of the most common alternatives to Jesus’ imminent apocalyptic expectation. But we have found them wanting. In my mind, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Jesus expected the end to arrive soon.

What to do with this theologically is another question. But I hope I have done enough to suggest that it is a theological question; not a historical one. The historical question of Jesus’ eschatology already has a satisfactory answer: Jesus expected the imminent arrival of the Kingdom, his disciples followed suit, and the end did not come.