Towards A Non-Apocalyptic Jesus

We have thus far focused on negative evidence; now I will briefly consider several more positive clues.  I want to be emphatic that these positive examples are secondary; the preponderance of non-apocalyptic Kingdom sayings and the weakness of the “son of man” sayings are the primary arguments.  These serve only to confirm, and they are by no means exhaustive.

Photo credit: More Good Foundation via Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Essentially, seriousness must be given to the question of why Jesus would have gone against not only his own mentor John, but the commonly-accepted Jewish belief in a coming divine intervention.  To this question only tentative hypotheses may be given, for Jesus is not around to ask.

Be that as it may, there is one very simple, by no means new explanation that makes perfect sense.  If Jesus went to John to become baptized, then he accepted (initially) John’s message that the Kingdom would be coming soon.  He may have even believed John to be the messiah; certainly there was no shortage of Messianic claimants in that time and that place.

But then Herod killed John.  In the gospels this happens after Jesus’s ministry is already underway, but that is only explicit in Matthew and Luke.  In Mark, the narrative of John’s execution is told in flashback form and the timeframe is unclear.  Actually, given that in Mark Herod thinks “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised,” of Jesus, it actually implies that it was not until after the death of John that Jesus’s movement became known, which given the short span of Jesus’s ministry, suggests that it did not begin until after John’s death.

Matthew and Luke copy Mark’s story, but before it they include the episode of John sending messengers from prison to ask Jesus if he truly is the Messiah.  There are several problems with assigning historical status to this event; first, it conflicts with what we just saw, that Jesus’s ministry most likely began in earnest after John’s death; two, Jesus almost certainly did not claim the title of Messiah for himself (see Vermes Jesus the Jew) and if he did it would certainly have been long after John’s death; three, Jesus’s reply about the blind receiving sight, etc. is a clear reference to Isaiah 35, which suggests that this is exegesis, not history.  It also precedes the genuine episode of Jesus praising John the Baptist, so this event is most likely a literary creation meant to set up Jesus’s exaltation of John.

So I say it is a fair assumption that Jesus accepted John’s program, was baptized into his movement, and after John’s arrest may have stepped up into an unofficial leadership position while they waited.  John was in prison; surely the kingdom would be arriving any day now.

Then, Herod executed John, and God did nothing.  There was no climax, no ceremony, and no consummation (and remember, the idea of a Messianic Parousia emerged after and as a reaction to Jesus).

So what was a zealous Jew who longed for God’s justice to do?  He could have continued John’s program verbatim, taking over as the figurehead and likely meeting the same fate as John eventually.  But what reason was there to believe that God would intervene the second time, if He hadn’t the first?

Or, as an alternative, his theology could be refined and his vision of the Kingdom updated.  Perhaps it was God who was doing the waiting, and the mission of humans to actively strive for the kingdom on Earth.

So Jesus began his Kingdom movement, which was intended as a large-scale paradigm shift on Jewish Messianic thought.  Instead of waiting for the Kingdom, Jesus says, be the Kingdom.

Other advocates of this theory have long been accused of stripping the spirituality or Jewishness from Jesus.  Preposterous.  This movement was grounded to its very core in God and what Jesus saw as God’s justice.  It was living as God would want you to live, living as if God is your sovereign.

Perhaps Jesus thought that at some point there would be a consummation and God would “meet them in the middle,” so to speak.  But I do not think so, and I think the fact that Christianity still exists is evidence enough to doubt.  How many other Messianic claimants, both violent and nonviolent, lived around the time of Jesus?  Many.  Perhaps hundreds that we don’t and will never know about.  They met their ends at the hands of the State, and their movements died with them.  Even John’s movement did not last.

Perhaps Jesus saw this tendency for movements grounded in a figurehead to collapse and wanted to subvert it.  Perhaps the Kingdom of God (as defined by Jesus) was intentionally set up in such a way that it could survive, and even thrive, after the eventual (and probable) death of its founder.  This is why today everyone knows the name Jesus of Nazareth, and few people know of The Egyptian, or Judas the Galilean.