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The End of Apocalypse: Rethinking the Eschatological Jesus
By Stephen J. Patterson

For almost a century, New Testament scholarship has been united around at least one proposition: The beginnings of New Testament theology are rooted in thinking that is thoroughly eschatological. Eschatology became a buzz word in New Testament theology at around the turn of the century when it was realized that Jesus' preaching, as it is presented in three of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), is very much concerned with "last" things-that is, the end of the world. In fact, in Mark (13:30) Jesus predicts that God will intervene to bring history to a violent and cataclysmic end before those listening to him would pass away. Christianity, it would seem, was grounded in an apocalyptic form of eschatology. The problem, of course, is that these things did not happen. Generations came and went, but history carried on, leaving Christian theology with a very difficult dilemma: What shall we do with eschatology?

Over the years, New Testament historians and theologians have struggled through debate after heated debate about Jesus' eschatological preaching. What does it mean? Should one take Jesus' apocalypticism literally? If so, should we assume that he was simply off on the timing and prepare ourselves for imminent tribulation? If such a course of action seems too rash and out of step with a twentieth-century world view, might Jesus' apocalyptic preaching be seen as nonetheless valuable and, therefore, worth translating using, let us say, existentialist categories? Might we embrace the idea of being eschatological without being apocalyptic? Or is apocalypticism only peripheral and incidental to Jesus' preaching, perhaps not even part of his preaching at all? Generally speaking, this last option has been out of the question. For the apocalypticism of Jesus is

Stephen J. Patterson teaches New Testament at Eden Theological Seminary. He is co-author of The Q-Thomas Reader (1990) and author of The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (1992).

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such a potentially embarrassing thing, so scandalous to the post-Enlightenment intellect of the twentieth century that its acceptance has long been considered a test of scholarly objectivity; anyone who would reject this hypothesis is viewed by his or her peers as a hopeless romantic, unable or unwilling to accept the scandalous reality that Jesus did not think like us.

But in spite of all this, New Testament scholarship is once again involved in a lively discussion of this issue: Did Jesus in fact believe that history was coming to a rapid, apocalyptic end? Amid protestations from theologians and exegetes, alike, a growing number of New Testament scholars is beginning to read the evidence in such a way as to call this once assured result of critical scholarship into question. To understand the nature of this debate and its significance for theology, it is necessary to begin with the origins of the apocalyptic hypothesis itself.

ORIGINS OF THE APOCALYPTIC HYPOTHESIS

1992 marked the centennial anniversary of the publication of Johannes Weiss's revolutionary book, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God.¹ In this brief but important monograph, Weiss argued that the reign of which the historical Jesus actually spoke was an apocalyptic reign, that is, one that God would usher in through the agency of an emissary, the Son of Man, whose return, flying in on clouds of glory, would be marked by great violence, tribulation, struggle, and, ultimately, judgment for all. This is, after all, how Mark 13 (and Matthew 24 and Luke 21 following Mark) presents the matter. Paul, too, thinks of the arrival of the reign of God in apocalyptic terms: "The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say 'There is peace and security,' then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape" (1 Thess. 5:2-3).

As self-evident as such a reading of the sources has seemed in recent years, it was not so self-evident in 1892. Historical inquiry into the cultural milieu into which Jesus was born and within which he preached was still a relatively young field in the late nineteenth century. It was philosophical analysis, not history, that served as the interpretive key to understanding the Scriptures. Theologians such as Albrecht Ritschl, for example, were at work transforming the ethical idealism of Immanuel Kant into the full flowering of liberal theology. Not that the results of this much-maligned liberal theology of the nineteenth century were all that bad. Ritschl describes the reign of God as those who believe in Christ, inasmuch as they treat one another with love without regard to differences of sex, rank or race, thereby bringing about a

¹ Johannes Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971 [German original, 18921).

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fellowship of moral attitude and moral properties extending through the whole range of human life in every possible variation.²

Naturally, when Johannes Weiss, the young, still wet-behind-the-ears student of Ritschl, appeared on the scene arguing that Jesus actually preached an apocalyptic reign of God that would bring the world to a violent and cataclysmic end, he did not receive much of a hearing. The German idealism of the nineteenth century was, above all else, optimistic about the future; the Jesus of Weiss would have been utterly irrelevant to its credo.

Weiss would not find popular acceptance until after the year 1906 when another young scholar by the name of Albert Schweitzer published the book that established him as one of his generation's great biblical scholars: The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This book, perhaps the most often cited work in New Testament scholarship, is also probably the most thoroughly misunderstood. It is often said that Schweitzer showed-by reviewing and then debunking all previous attempts at an historical reconstruction of Jesus' life-how futile and self-serving any attempt to arrive at an historical reconstruction of Jesus' life and preaching ultimately was. This is not what Schweitzer intended to show at all. Rather, his criticism was aimed against scholars of the nineteenth century whose analysis was grounded in the theology and ideology of liberalism rather than in genuine historical analysis. In Schweitzer's view, Ritschl's Jesus was "a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb. "³ Schweitzer was not critical of historical research per se. To the contrary, he had very definite ideas about what historical research could tell us about Jesus: He was as Weiss had described him-an apocalyptic preacher convinced that the end of history was near.

"The Quest for the Historical Jesus, perhaps the most often cited work in New Testament scholarship, is also probably the most thoroughly misunderstood."

While the acceptance of Schweitzer's work was not universal, it did find a receptive audience (especially in Europe) and ultimately won the day for Weiss's view of Jesus. From our own vantage point, we may now look back upon the eighty plus years since the publication of Schweitzer's work and say that Weiss's and Schweitzer's apocalyptic view of Jesus has been the dominant paradigm for understanding Jesus for

² Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (Edinburgh:T.& T. Clark, 1902 [German original, 1883]), p. 285.
³ Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: Adam & Charles. Black,1911 [German original, 1906]), p. 396.

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most of the twentieth century. But why was Schweitzer able to succeed in 1906 where Weiss had failed in 1892?

The answer is simple. Times changed. The optimism of the nineteenth century had, by 1906, almost completely evaporated with the increasing political instability that characterized Europe in the years leading up to World War 1. In its place, there arose a profound sense of dread and uncertainty as an increasingly dark future loomed ever larger on the horizon. The mood is captured most poignantly in the autobiography of Sir Edward Grey, who, on the eve of World War 1, recalls having uttered to a close friend words that would be used repeatedly to capture the spirit of times: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."⁴ In the midst of the cultural optimism of 1892, Weiss's apocalyptic Jesus was a scandal; in the atmosphere of cultural pessimism that was just beginning to come to expression in 1906, this apocalyptic Jesus was just what the doctor ordered.

This state of affairs in Western culture has not altered much over the course of this century. This has been true especially in Europe, devastated by two World Wars and the economic instability and collapse that fueled the fires of discontent, and disturbed by the specter of the Holocaust that hangs over the European psyche as a constant reminder of' humanity's potential to social pathology and unfathomable evil. Further, Central Europe has been held hostage between two super powers, a kind of buffer zone in which the horrors of a limited nuclear war would convince the antagonists to pull back before destroying the entire planet. All of these factors have given twentieth-century European culture a profound sense of pessimism about culture and the future. If anyone could recall during the very latest developments in European history having caught at least a glimmer of hope for the future, it has since been quashed once again with the emergence of such ominous phenomena as ethnic cleansing.

In North America, this cultural trend was delayed for the first half of this century. With the exception of the 1930s, North American culture during this period was oriented toward progress and hope in the future. While the tragedy of two World Wars was felt here as well, it was not experienced with the intensity and sense of loss that characterized Europe. No cities were destroyed, no cultural treasures were lost, no crowds of refugees roamed streets of rubble in search of relatives lost to the ravages of war. Instead, our streets were filled with ticker-tape. Newsreels and Hollywood combined to create a romance of war, and the victories served to bolster the self-confidence of North American culture at levels never before experienced. As might be expected, the apocalyptic Jesus of Weiss and Schweitzer did not make much of an impact here at that time. Instead, Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel-the North American version of liberal theology-exercised the greatest influence on

⁴ Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co.,1925), Vol. 2, p. 20.

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the quest for the historical Jesus among North American scholars, led by the Chicago School of Shirley Jackson Case and Shailer Mathews. Here Rauschenbusch's call for Christianizing the Social Order⁵ still made sense in an atmosphere of undiminished hope for what might be achieved in human culture.

But by the 1950s, the cultural pessimism that began with the political collapse of Europe and the catastrophe of two World Wars eventually began to wash up onto the victorious, self-confident, can-do shores of North America as well, as we faced the psychologically debilitating realities of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear or environmental disaster, and the social upheaval of the 1960s. We too began to experience the cultural malaise that had held its grip on Europe for the first half of the century. This change in attitude is expressed perhaps most eloquently by Reinhold Niebuhr in his 1952 essay, The Irony of American History:

Could there be a clearer tragic dilemma than that which faces our civilization? Though confident of its virtue, it must hold atomic bombs ready for use so as to prevent a possible world conflagration.... Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.... Our dreams of moving the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.⁶

What Niebuhr, as a member of the generation that created the nuclear age, saw as a tragic and bitter irony has become for the present generation

"The latest phase of research into the history of the Gospel tradition has produced too many results that do not fit the apocalyptic paradigm. "

an existential presupposition. The result has been a pessimism about culture and its future, pervasive throughout Western society, that has not gone unnoticed in the annals of philosophical history. The great historian of Western thought W. T. Jones has written about our age:

Students of contemporary culture have characterized this century in various ways-for instance, as the age of anxiety, the aspirin age, the nuclear age, the age of one-dimensional man, the post-industrial age; but nobody, unless a candidate for political office at some political convention, has called this a happy age.... The rise of dictatorships, two world wars, genocide, the deterioration of the environment, and the Vietnam war have all had a share

⁵ Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
⁶ Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), pp. 1-3.

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in undermining the old beliefs in progress, in rationality, and in people's capacity to control their own destiny and improve their lot.⁷

Jones may thus speak of a "collapse of confidence" in Western thought. Is it any wonder that, as in European theology during the first half of this century, so also in North America since the 1950s the optimistic strains of the social gospel and its liberal Jesus have gradually given way to the assumption that Jesus preached an apocalyptic eschatology. For the moment, the theological future belonged to those who would attempt to interpret this apocalypticism theologically: Barth, Bultmann, Niebuhr, and Moltmann. The apocalyptic Jesus of Johannes Weiss found his home among us. No longer a stranger, his pessimism about the future gave expression to the profound pessimism that characterized our own cultural psychology.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE APOCALYPTIC HYPOTHESIS

But nothing lasts forever, even the hard-won results of methodologically conscientious historical research. New data that do not fit the old paradigm, data generated from new discoveries or new methods and insights into the old subject matter. gradually accumulate to reach a critical mass beyond Which the old paradigm is exposed as no longer adequate. I believe that the latest phase of research into the history of the gospel tradition has produced too many results that do not fit the apocalyptic paradigm of Johannes Weiss. This is reflected in much recent scholarship on Jesus. In 1986, Marcus Borg ventured "A Temperate Case for a Non-eschatological Jesus,⁸ a case he built more elaborately in a book issued the following year.⁹ In 1991, John Dominic Crossan published his magisterial study of Jesus, The Historical Jesus,¹⁰ followed by a popular rendition in 1994, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.¹¹ Far from Weiss's apocalyptic prophet of the end times, Crossan's Jesus is a radically counter-cultural social critic, who proclaimed immediate access to an unbrokered reign of God for persons marginalized from the conventional means to humane living. Most recently, Robert Funk and Roy Hoover have just released the final report on the sometimes controversial Jesus Seminar in the form of a color-coded commentary on the words of Jesus.¹² Throughout the four canonical and one non-canonical Gospels covered in their report, one will find no apocalyptic sayings

⁷ W. T. Jones, The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), p. 2.
⁸ Marcus Borg, "A Temperate Case for a Non-eschatological Jesus," Forum, 2 (1986), pp. 81-102.
⁹ Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (San Francisco: Harper, 1987).
¹⁰ John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991).
¹¹ John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994).
¹² Robert Funk and Ray Hoover, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

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printed in red (indicating the relative certainty that Jesus in fact spoke such words).

But these recent results do not come as a surprise to most specialists. For several years, the old consensus has been falling apart as the century of the apocalyptic Jesus came to a quiet, almost unnoticed close. In the 1980s, two polls of New Testament scholars specializing in the study of the historical Jesus indicated that already holes were developing in the ranks of the once lock-step scholarly consensus that Weiss's apocalyptic Jesus was the best historical construct. When posed the question, Do you think Jesus expected the end of the world in his generation, that is, in the lifetime of at least some of his contemporaries? two-thirds of those responding from the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature replied no.¹³A similar poll of participants in the Jesus Seminar revealed that they too rejected Weiss's view by a three-to-one majority.¹⁴ What has called for such a complete about-face from the old consensus?

The old consensus, while holding a certain cultural appeal, was in fact based upon a consensus among the sources themselves. The earliest of the canonical Gospels, Mark, presents Jesus as thoroughly steeped in and motivated by Jewish apocalyptic. But Mark is not alone in presenting Jesus in this way. The second source used by Matthew and Luke, a sayings gospel now lost, but referred to conventionally in New Testament scholarship as "Q, " also understands Jesus as a prophet of apocalyptic judgment. This was especially important, for Q is the earliest identifiable document in the gospel tradition. Finally, Paul, who authored our earliest New Testament writings, also understood Christian faith as grounded in an apocalyptic view of history, his utopian communities of the Spirit anticipating proleptically the imminent arrival of the reign of God. But this consensus began to fatter in the face of historical-critical research. New developments on a number of fronts combined to undermine the older view.

(1) Q and Early Christian Wisdom

First, thirty years of research on "Q" has begun to produce a new consensus about this document. Beginning with the work of the German scholar Dieter Lührmann, and more recently in the research of North Americans Arland Jacobson and John Kloppenborg,¹⁵ it has become increasingly clear that Q was not originally an apocalyptic document at all, but-to take the widely accepted view of Kloppenborg-a collection

¹³ Borg, "A Temperate Case," pp. 98-99.
¹⁴ James R. Butts, "Probing the Polling: Jesus Seminar Results on the Kingdom Sayings," Forum 3 (1987) p. 110. This survey repeats that of Marcus Borg, who polled the Jesus Seminar on this issue in 1985 ("Temperate Case," pp. 98-99). Then, just over half of those who responded to Borg's survey rejected Weiss's hypothesis. Thus, the 1986 poll shows a significant and rapid movement away from the old consensus.
¹⁵ Dieter Lührmann, Die Redaktion der Logienquelle (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969); Arland Jacobson, The First Gospel: An Introduction to Q (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1992); John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987).

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of wisdom speeches, such as one finds in Luke's Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20-49; Matt. 5:3-12, 38-48; 7:1-5; 12:33-35; 7:15-20, 21-27) or the speech On Cares (Luke 12:22-32; Matt. 6:25-34). The Q apocalypse (Luke 17:22-37; Matt 24:23-28, 37-42), as well as the sayings of judgment aimed against "this generation" scattered throughout the document, affixed like barnacles to this earlier stratum of wisdom speeches, belong to a later edition of Q. They represent a moment of frustration in the history of the Q community itself, when it realized that the wisdom of Jesus was not having as great an impact as it had originally hoped.

The relatively obscure and tediously technical work of Kloppenborg and others working today on the problem of Q is very important for two reasons. First, the fact that the Q tradition is not ultimately rooted in apocalypticism means that the once apparent unanimity of the early sources around this point is no more. Moreover, it is Q, the earliest source we have for the preaching of Jesus, that has broken ranks. That leaves Paul and Mark as the remaining early witnesses to an apocalyptic understanding of Jesus. But Paul seldom makes use of sayings or other traditions from the teaching of Jesus and is therefore of limited help in reconstructing Jesus' preaching. As for Mark, while he generally did not make use of Q, there -is ample evidence to suggest that he at least knew the Q document, which likely pre-dates Mark by at least a decade, and perhaps more. Thus, he may well have been influenced by the later edition of Q and its latter day apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus.

(2) The Gospel of Thomas

While scholars of the synoptic tradition were working on the problem of 0, another development appeared on the scene that would serve to confirm the, general tendencies of the Synoptic tradition identified by Kloppenborg and others: the Gospel of Thomas. This non-canonical gospel was widely known in antiquity, but due largely to its content (considered heretical by many ancient church authorities) it fell into disuse and gradually dropped from sight in the early Middle Ages. It reappeared as part of a spectacular discovery of ancient manuscripts in 1945-not the Dead Sea Scrolls but a lesser-known discovery of even greater significance for the study of Christian origins than the Scrolls themselves: the Nag Hammadi Library.¹⁶ This small library of thirteen leather-bound codices was discovered by villagers in Upper Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi. Among the more than fifty tractates that fill these ancient books there is a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas.

Thomas is not a Gospel like those with which we are familiar in the canonical tradition. Unlike those Gospels, it does not purport to say anything about the life of Jesus; rather, it is simply a collection of Jesus' sayings. It is in this respect quite comparable to Q, which itself contains

¹⁶ For an English translation of these texts and an account of their discovery see The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson (3rd Revised Edition; San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988).

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very little narrative. Its chief importance for the present discussion, however, lies in its content. Of the 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, more than half have parallels in the Synoptic tradition, including parallels to both Q and Mark. Furthermore, these sayings in Thomas do not derive from the Synoptic Gospels themselves, but from the same oral traditions available to the Synoptic evangelists and their sources.¹⁷ This means that we now have in Thomas a critical tool with which better to understand the development of the Synoptic- tradition itself. Those attributes that Thomas and the Synoptic tradition share are more likely to have come from an early point in the development of the Jesus tradition, perhaps even Jesus himself. Conversely, those things that are not shared but isolated to one or another of these trajectories are less likely to have early roots.

The Thomas and Synoptic trajectories do share much in common. Both contain parables-especially parables of the reign of God, in which worldly values and expectations are turned topsy turvy. Both speak of the reign of God as present and spread out "among you" (Thom. 3 and 113). Almost all of Luke's Sermon on the Plain is found at some point in Thomas, including the beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor" (Thom. 54) "the hungry" (Thom. 69:2) and "the persecuted" (Thom. 68). Portions of the speech On Cares are found in Thomas (Thom. 36), and there are a host of wisdom sayings found in both trajectories. Whatever this common tradition will eventually tell us about the preaching of Jesus, there is one element profoundly absent from it: apocalypticism. Most of Thomas's parallels to Q are to Kloppenborg's early, wisdom stratum in Q (Q¹). There are a few parallels to sayings from the later apocalyptic stratum (Q²), but where there are parallels to Q², in each case tradition-historical analysis shows that the Q saying has been secondarily "apocalypticized." This is also true of Thomas-Mark parallels. When Mark's version of a saying or parable is framed to reflect apocalyptic concerns, such framing can without exception be shown to be secondary.¹⁸ Thus, what the study of Q had already suggested about the relatively late tendency of the Synoptic tradition to develop in the direction of apocalyptic is confirmed by comparative analysis with the Gospel of Thomas. The earliest identifiable stratum of the Jesus tradition is not apocalyptic; it is, therefore, becoming less and less likely that Jesus himself preached an apocalyptic message.¹⁹

¹⁷ Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1992), pp. 9-110. This view of Thomas is followed by most North American scholars. European scholarship tends not to regard Thomas as an independent tradition.
¹⁸ Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, pp. 217-241; see also Stephen J. Patterson, "Wisdom in Q and Thomas," In Search of Wisdom: Essays in Memory of John G. Gammie, edited by Leo G. Purdue, Bernard Brandon Scott, and William Johnston Wiseman, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 187-221.
¹⁹ In his recent work, The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan takes as his starting point this earliest identifiable stratum. His is the first study to take seriously the implications of recent research on the Gospel of Thomas, research in which Crossan himself has played a role.

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But the study of Q and Thomas has not been the sole factor in turning the tide against the hypothesis of Weiss and Schweitzer. Other developments in New Testament scholarship have been preparing the way for such a shift for quite some time.

(3) The Post-Bultmannian Movement

One of these may be identified as emerging from within the ranks of neoorthodox theology itself, whose main spokespersons, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth, essentially embraced the hypothesis of Weiss and Schweitzer and undertook to transform apocalypticism into a theologically relevant modern paradigm. But the next generation of scholars, especially those who had studied with Bultmann, began to question the data that necessitated this procedure. In an essay published in 1957, Bultmann's former student Philipp Vielhauer noticed that, in the Gospels, the apocalyptic Son of Man figure is not found in the same context as talk about the reign of God. This, Vielhauer argued, was because these two concepts did not belong together in contemporary Jewish thought. The Son of Man figure belongs to speculation concerning a future ideal age ushered in by God's emissary; the expression "reign of God" expresses the living hope that God reigns (now!). Since Vielhauer presumed that the reign of God was at the center of Jesus' preaching, the Son of Man sayings naturally fell under suspicion. This suspicion is confirmed in Vielhauer's systematic tradition-historical treatment of all the Son of Man sayings in the Gospels, with the result that all except one (Matt. 24:37-39-here the question remains open) are judged to be products of later Christian interpretation, not sayings of Jesus himself.²⁰

Soon thereafter, another of Bultmann's students endorsed Vielhauer's position. Also in 1957, Hans Conzelmann published an article in which he argued that, insofar as Jesus associates the reign of God with his own person and preaching, he excludes any futuristic/temporal aspect from the concept. Rather, Jesus' proclamation of the reign of God functioned existentially as a call to decision to accept or reject its reality. Consequently, there is no room for a future intermediary figure such as the apocalyptic Son of Man.²¹ This position was also adopted by perhaps the best known of Bultmann's students, Ernst Käsemann. Käsemarm cast Vielhauer's basic position in terms of Jesus' relationship to John the Baptist:

The fact of the matter is surely that while Jesus did take his start from the apocalyptically determined message of John the Baptist, yet his own preaching was not constitutively stamped by apocalyptic but proclaimed the immediate nearness of God. I am convinced that the man who took this step cannot have awaited the coming Son of man, the restoration of the twelve

²⁰ Philipp Vielhauer, "Gottesreich und Menschensohn in der Verkündigung Jesu," in Festschrift für Günther Dehn, edited by W. Schneemelcher (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1957), pp. 51-79, esp. 77 and 56-71.
²¹ Hans Conzelmann, "Gegenwart und Zukunft in der synoptischen Tradition," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 54 (1957), esp. pp. 281-288.

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tribes in the messianic kingdom, and therewith the dawn of the parousia, as the means of experiencing the nearness of God.²²

Thus, among the students of Rudolf Bultmann, the Weiss/Schweitzer hypothesis that Jesus spoke of a future apocalyptic reign of God that is yet to come was given up in favor of the idea that, in his preaching, Jesus proclaimed a reign of God that was already in some sense present.

(4) The American Discussion of Parables

Another older development that prepared the way for the current paradigm shift came about in the area of parables research. It, however, was associated primarily with American scholarship rather than with European efforts. The American discussion of parables began with the work of Amos Wilder. Since he was the brother of famed playwright Thornton Wilder, it is perhaps natural that he should bring a family sensitivity to literary critical matters to bear on the study of the New Testament. Wilder explored the parables of Jesus as metaphors. A true metaphor, Wilder argued, is more than a sign, a point of comparison. Rather, as a narrative, an extended metaphor creates for the listener a world whose reality unfolds in his or her imagination. In spinning extended metaphors for the reign of God, Jesus draws the listener into the reality that is created in the telling of it so that he or she actually becomes a participant in it. Thus, through Jesus' parables the listener does not simply hear about the reign of God; rather, it becomes a reality to be experienced, to shock, to transform .²³

"The earliest identifiable stratum of the Jesus tradition is not apocalyptic. "

This understanding of parable as a metaphoric creation of the reign of God is important for the work of two other American parables scholars: Robert W. Funk and John Dominic Crossan-figures who have emerged of late as crucial in the current reorientation of thinking about Jesus. In an article now considered to be a watershed in the modern study of parables, Funk contrasts the parable, as metaphor, to a simple simile in which A is said to be like B. While a simile is illustrative of an object that is already known, a metaphor has the ability to create something new, using language to call into being an imaginative reality heretofore not experienced and unknown. In this sense, parables have the capacity to occasion the revelation of something new-the reign of God. In Jesus' parables, this is accomplished by using something common, something

²² Ernst Käsemann, "The Beginnings of Christian Theology," in Apocalypticism (Journal for Theology and the Church 6; New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 39-40.
²³ Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (rev. ed; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 84.

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from the everyday world of Jesus and his listeners as the basic subject matter of the parable. But as the narrative unfolds, something surprising and unconventional always happens, thwarting the listener's expectations and creating an alternative reality to that of his or her common experience. The parable thus becomes a "language event,"

in which the hearer has to choose between two worlds. If he elects the parabolic world, he is invited to dispose himself to concrete reality as it is ordered in the parable, and venture, without benefit of landmark but on the parable's authority, into the future.²⁴

The idea that a parable is a language event in which the reign of God is encountered by the listener is central also to the work of Crossan. Crossan emphasizes the extent to which language gives shape to a person's perception of the world. This aspect of language can be seen in the way various kinds of stories are related functionally to the world. Drawing upon the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, Crossan, for example, describes the way "myth" functions to reconcile intolerable incongruities in our world. A popular American myth might be the Horatio Alger story, in which the opposite realities of poverty and wealth are reconciled via a narrative in which the former is transformed into the latter through hard work and creativity. This script, of course, does not actually reconcile these opposite realities; it just gives us a way to

"Parables have the capacity to occasion the revelation of something new--the reign of God.

live with them more comfortably. In this way, myth establishes and legitimates social world. Parable, on the other hand, does the opposite. Rather than smoothing over the contradictions in our world, parable tends to undermine the world-creating script provided by myth and to accentuate, or even to create, contradictions and tensions. If the language of myth creates world, parable destroys world, and in that action creates the possibility for encounter with the reign of God. "Parables," writes Crossan,

are stories which shatter the deep structure of our accepted world and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity of story itself. They remove our defenses and make us vulnerable to God. It is only in such experiences that God can touch us, and only in such moments does the Kingdom of God arrive.²⁵

For Crossan, as for Wilder and Funk, parables are key to understanding how it is that Jesus can authentically speak of the reign of God as present:

²⁴ Robert Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and the Word of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 162.
²⁵ John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval.- Towards a Theology of Story (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1988 [originally published in 1975]), p. 100.

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It becomes a reality in the very preaching of Jesus itself. It encounters the listener insofar as he or she allows the parabolic event to deconstruct the world as he or she has constructed it. As the conventional world of meaning (-lessness) is shattered by the parable, the reign of God comes breaking in. In parable, the reign of God is at hand,

So the newest phase of research on Q and the Gospel of Thomas, calling into question the apocalyptic hypothesis, did not emerge in a vacuum. For many years now, New Testament scholarship has been chipping away at the apocalyptic paradigm. Through the post-Bultmannian discussion of the reign of God as present, not future, and the newer American discussion of parables as language events in which the reign of God becomes a present reality, New Testament scholars have become accustomed to entertaining a view of the reign of God that is not apocalyptic. The realization that the earliest phase of the Jesus tradition was not apocalyptically oriented simply served to confirm this view of the reign of God in the preaching of Jesus. The convergence of these various lines of research is what convinces me that we are now arriving at a new consensus position about the reign of God: Jesus did not conceive of it as a future, apocalyptic event, but as a present reality to be experienced as breaking in upon the present world of human existence.

THEOLOGY WITHOUT APOCALYPTIC

What will the collapse of the apocalyptic hypothesis mean for theology? Can Christian theology get along without apocalyptic eschatology?

Of course, the historian's research showing that Jesus did not himself think of the reign of God in terms of imminent apocalyptic scenarios does not mean that theology, especially biblical theology, can be done with such matters. After all, much of the New Testament is still oriented to an apocalypticism that emerges already in the letters of Paul and in the earliest canonical Gospel, Mark. New Testament theology must still face the uncomfortable fact that apocalyptic thinking shaped the way many early Christians came to see Jesus as somehow significant for their own future. More work, such as that which has been done on Revelation by Adela Yarbro-Collins²⁶ and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,²⁷ which explores how apocalypticism functions as cathartic and ennobling for persons pushed to the margins of an oppressive society, needs to be done with respect to Paul and the Synoptic Gospels as well. It may be that in certain culturally specific circumstances apocalypticism indeed provides an apt language for giving expression to Christian hope. At the same time, Christian theology must take seriously the ultimate failure of all such scenarios. For they are all scenarios of imminent catastrophe. It will not do to salvage them by simply delaying their arrival into an indefinite

²⁶ Adela Yarbro-Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).
²⁷ Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, "Redemption as Liberation: Rev. 1:5-6 and 5:9-10," CBQ 36 (1974), pp. 220-232.

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future. Ultimately, we must realize that God will not, perhaps cannot, rectify injustice through the violence and power of apocalypse.

But quite apart from our assessment of how apocalypticism functions in early Christianity, we must also turn our attention to how apocalypticism has functioned in our own culture. Even though the historian's work may not dislodge apocalyptic eschatology from Christian theology altogether, it may open enough space to question the apocalyptic focus of so much of modern Christian theology and to consider anew the basic theological issues that confront the church and, more broadly, the cultural dilemmas to which theology must ultimately direct itself.

In raising such questions, we must recognize at the outset that the apocalyptic paradigm itself was not without positive cultural significance at a crucial juncture in Western history. For example, when Niebuhr wrote that the ethical demands made by Jesus will be possible "only when God transmutes the present chaos of this world into its final unity," that the reign of God "is in fact always coming but never here," he intended to call American culture into a stance of self-criticism.²⁸ America in 1956 did not embody the hoped-for reign of God; with the god-like power of nuclear destruction at our fingertips, we needed to be reminded of this. This is no less true today.

But the apocalyptic paradigm can also have its own debilitating and self-serving tendencies. The repeated assertion that God's decisive activity in the world belongs to the future and that until God decides to act we must be content to live in an imperfect world can lead to complacency about the problems we face as a culture. In the face of such a temporaltheological dualism, in which the present is given over to an imperfect humanity while the future is placed in God's exclusive hands, one can only conclude that any -resent, human attempt at reform is ultimately futile. Moreover, it is unnecessary, for the security of God's intervention in the future means that ultimately humanity will not have to deal with its current problems anyway. The idea of a father God who arrives just in time to save his unruly children from their own inevitable foolishness is an unhealthy starting point, both theologically and culturally. Finally, the fact that most biblical apocalyptic scenarios feature violence has had a particularly ominous effect on how we imagine solutions to problems we think we are able to handle. The massive use of force and violence with almost god-like efficiency during the recent Gulf War was nothing less than apocalyptic for those on the receiving end of that onslaught. One must also wonder at the long-term effect such an overwhelming use of power will have on the American psyche. Whatever its virtues might have been in calling Western culture into a stance of greater self-criticism in the first part of this century, in our own time the apocalyptic paradigm has taken its toll.

²⁸ Reinhold Niebuhr, Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Meridian, 1956), pp.59-60

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To remove the apocalyptic paradigm from the center of theology might mean that the temporal-theological dualism that claims the present for the imperfect, inevitably flawed realm of human activity, while relegating the future to the transcendent realm of God's absolute sovereignty, would have to be abandoned. In fact, perhaps what is called for initially is a therapeutic theological reversal in which the present is relinquished to the divine purpose of justice and peace, while humanity claims as its own the future, whose inhabitability will be determined by the extent to which we are willing to assume responsibility for giving it an inhabitable shape. No more can the apocalyptic hope for a better world created at God's sole initiative, a hope that continually recedes into the future, allow us to breathe a complacent sigh about the massive cultural problems that face us as a society and to pray for Christ's swift return. Liberation theologians have long tried to convince European and North American theologians from traditionally empowered groups how self-serving this theological paradigm has been: Waiting is easy if you already have everything and lack nothing for which you must wait. Now, historical criticism has formed a new alliance with liberation theology and offered new grounds for calling this dominant paradigm into question.

But what will replace it? And how will any new paradigm avoid the pitfalls, on the one hand, of an uncritical acceptance of Western bourgeois culture as the culmination of God's hope for human existence and, on the other hand, of a purely apocalyptic theology, with its unending deference to the future as the transcendent realm of God's activity? Is there a Christian theology that allows one to be optimistic about realizing in human history a level of justice and peace that would make the reign of God more than a mere cipher for Christian idealism while at the same time retaining the capacity for self-critical evaluation of culture?

THE EMPIRE OF GOD

At the end of the nineteenth century, there seemed to be but two choices for Western theology: the moral theology of liberalism or the radically world-negating theology of apocalyptic. Over time, the latter carried the day because the latest critical thinking about Jesus, together with the powerful forces of cultural change, lay in its favor. Yet another shift in the critical consensus will again call for a theological adjustment. But the choices today will not be the same as those of a hundred years ago. A new consensus that Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet will not necessarily mean a return to nineteenth century liberalism. To the contrary, in my view there are crucial elements in the latest phase of Jesus scholarship that point in quite another direction. Each has to do 'With a concept most scholars still agree in placing at the center of Jesus' preaching: the reign of God.

When Jesus spoke of the arrival of a new "reign," he was not using language unfamiliar to those around him. The term in question is basileia. It is often rendered "kingdom"-a term that lingers from the "King's English" into which the first authorized English translations were made.

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Today, this term is not used very much, except, that is, when discussing Christian theology. Its relegation to the theological sphere makes it sound both uniquely religious and uniquely Christian. But basileia is neither. When Jesus used this term, he would have been very conscious of the fact that it had another primary referent. This was the term that Rome used to describe itself. When we encounter it in ancient secular texts or in inscriptions from the period, we always translate it "empire." There was only one empire in the Mediterranean basin in the first century, the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire saturated every aspect of life. From the seven hills of its opulent capitol to the dusty roads of its servile provinces, Rome spread its peace to all the world: the Pax Romana. Jesus would have known this peace early in life. Not long after Jesus' birth, Rome sent one of its generals, Varus, into Galilee to quell protests over the prospects of yet another Rome-appointed client ruler from the notorious house of Herod. Just over the hill from Nazareth, he razed the city of Sepphoris and sold its inhabitants into slavery. In Judea, he burned Emmaus to the

"The fact that most biblical apocalyptic scenarios feature violence has had a particularly ominous effect on how we imagine solutions to problems we think we are able to handle.

ground and crucified two thousand for their part in the protests.²⁹ All in a days work. Tacitus imagines how such silenced voices might have described such a Pax.- "To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname 'empire'; they make a desolation and they call it peace."³⁰ Jesus encountered this peace again at the end of his life, when he, too, became its victim, one of thousands, who died on a Roman cross.

Helmut Koester has recently warned that any credible treatment of the historical Jesus must begin with and take seriously the fact that Jesus died as a victim of the Roman Pax.³¹ His death was not an accident. To be sure, it was not likely observed as the world-transforming event Christians would later proclaim it to be. But neither was it a mere accident on the stage of history, an unfortunate incident in a world filled with random violence. Jesus was arrested and tried in a Roman court, convicted of sedition against the Roman state, and executed in a manner typical of the

²⁹ Josephus, War 2.66-75; Ant. 17.288-295.
³⁰ ricola 30. The words are those of Calgacus, the Briton general whose forces are crushed by Agricola. Such words from the pen of a Roman playwright are quite astounding. For an account of Roman rule in the provinces that provides an important corrective to earlier, more romantic treatments, see Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 1-58.
³¹ Helmut Koester, "Jesus the Victim," Journal of Biblical Literature 111 (1992), pp. 3-15.

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way Rome dealt with its enemies.³² Why? We do not have to imagine an unspoken political or military agenda, or secret ties to Zealots to account for Jesus' fate. It was enough that Jesus dared to speak of a new Empire, an Empire of God. To speak thus is to say that there may be something amiss in the Empire we now have. Indeed, to speak of an Empire that belongs to beggars, the hungry, the depressed, the persecuted,³³ an Empire in which the first are last and the lastfirst,³⁴ would have been to challenge imperial priorities and offer Empire precisely to those expendables³⁵ left out of Rome's concept of Pax. In daring to speak of Empire, Jesus joined a line of philosophers, Cynics, and prophets who questioned the authenticity of the Roman Pax, and he paid for it with his life.³⁶

Jesus saw clearly the pain and brutality of the world in which he lived and dared to construct in word and deed a new world coming into being. In this sense, Jesus' preaching may be said to have an eschatological dimension, even though it was not apocalyptic. This is not mere special pleading or a vain attempt to rescue the visionary aspects of eschatology without the offense of apocalyptic. Apocalyptic was but one form of eschatology in the ancient world. In the violent and catastrophic days of the Jewish war, it was this form of eschatology that Mark deemed most appropriate to giving expression to Christian hope. But before Mark,

³² Centuries of Christian anti-Semitism have made these matters among the most difficult for Christians to deal with. It is not unreasonable to suppose some amount of collaboration among well-placed Jews in Jerusalem, whose interests were closely allied with those of Rome. But that the trial of Jesus took place before the Roman prefect, Pilate, that the title "King of the Jews," as well as Jesus' crucifixion with two "bandits" (lestes, a term reserved for rebels, not thieves) indicates that he was accused and convicted of sedition against Rome and that the method of his execution, crucifixion, was characteristic of Roman, not Jewish, practice, all seem to me to be beyond reasonable doubt. On these and other points, see the excellent treatment by Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (second edition, revised by T. A. Burkill and Geza Vermes; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1974).
³³ The reference is to the four beatitudes in Luke's Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20b-23). They are usually regarded as more primitive than their Matthean counterparts in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:3, 6, 4, 11-12). Three are also attested independently in the Gospel of Thomas (Thom. 54 [poor]; 69:2 [hungry]; 68:1 [persecuted]) The Jesus Seminar recently rendered the opinion that the first three were uttered by Jesus himself, the fourth was not, but lies close to something Jesus might have said (see "The Jesus Seminar: Voting Records," Forum 6,1 [1990], p. 15). For an argument for the historicity of all four see Crossan, The Historicall Jesus, pp. 270-274.
³⁴ The reference is to the saying familiar from Mark 10:31. It is found also in Matt. 19:30; 20:16; Luke 13:30; and Thom. 4:2. Of these various versions, the Jesus Seminar attributed Matt. 20:16 and the version of Thom. 4:2 found in POxy 654 to the historical Jesus (see "The Jesus Seminar: Voting Records," pp. 43, 47).
³⁵ This term derives from Gerhard Lenski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) pp. 281-282. "Expendables" are that surplus of persons for whom the dominant classes have no particular use and thus could perish without much notice. Crossan draws attention to Lenski's stratification, especially this bottom layer, as that to which many of Jesus' earliest followers belonged (The Historical Jesus, esp. pp. 266-282).
³⁶ Street philosophers were regularly expelled from Rome for their critique of Roman leadership and Roman culture in general. See D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism from Diogenes to the 6th Century A. D. (London: Methuen, 1937), pp. 125-142. For countercultural movements and their fate in Palestine under Roman rule, see Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), esp. pp. 160-167.

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before Q, and even before Paul, there was Jesus and his eschatological vision of the Empire of God. The deeply political overtones of this terminology suggest another primary frame of reference: the political eschatology proffered by Rome throughout the lands of its conquest. Penned by such great court poets as Horace and Virgil and inscribed on its monuments throughout the ancient world, Rome, too, spread the "good news" of a new, universal Empire, of which there would be no end, They too could speak of a "savior," a "Son of God" born to save the world and bring about this new Empire and to rule as its "Lord.' "³⁷ This savior was Augustus.

It is no accident that earliest Christians took over this vocabulary and made it their own in the years following Jesus' death. This was a hostile takeover. The polemical intent of the parallelism cannot be missed.³⁸ They understood that Jesus had been the victim of Roman eschatology and that this was no accident. Jesus' eschatological vision had offered a radically different alternative to Roman eschatology. The difference might be described effectively in any number of ways. Crossan ³⁹ has described it thus: Rome offered a "brokered Empire," in which the means to life were tightly controlled as they passed down the chain of brokered relationships; patrons and their clients engaged in an uneven, but functional, quid pro quo, until at long last the final few droplets of sustenance might drip through to the bottom of the heap. Jesus, by contrast, began at the bottom, with the expendables-the beggars, the prostitutes, the blind and disabled-offering them an "unbrokered Empire," in which the means to life are offered freely, without condition, around a table open to the unclean, the dispossessed, the shut out. This was another sort of empire, the Empire of God. Its radical reversal of priorities and values means that it cannot easily be merged with a political and social order that still presupposes that the means to life must be brokered. Jesus did not advocate a kind of moral fine tuning that would eventually perfect human society. He offered a radically different notion of how to order human life.

There is one more difference between these alternative views of Empire. One empire was already here, the other was not. Or was it? The Roman Empire was surely present. Its reality was not in question. Roman eschatology was realized eschatology.⁴⁰ For a Jewish peasant in the first century, this would have been abundantly clear. But what about Jesus' unbrokered Empire of God? Jesus proclaimed its presence, but not in the same, self-confident way that Rome could assert its Empire. Jesus could proclaim the presence of his unbrokered Empire only in a qualified sense.

³⁷ The language of the imperial cult is documented in Adolf Deissmann's classic work, Light from the Ancient East (New York: George H. Doran, 1927) pp. 338-378. Koester provides a succinct summary of Roman eschatology in "Jesus the Victim," pp. 10-13.
³⁸ Deissmann suggests that this Christian mimicking of official imperial language constitutes a "polemical paralellism" (Light from the Ancient East, pp. 342-343).
³⁹ Crossan, The Historical Jesus.
⁴⁰ Koester, "Jesus the Victim," pp. 10-13.

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This qualified presence finds expression in the saying of Jesus attested in Luke 17:20b-21:⁴¹

"The Empire of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the Empire of God is in the midst of YOU."

Its twin in the Gospel of Thomas (Thom. 113) reads similarly:

His disciples said to him, "When will the Empire come?" "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Behold, here' or 'Behold, there.' Rather, the Empire of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it."

Here the Empire of God is not offered as a future, apocalyptic reality upon which one must continually wait. But neither is it a fully present, realized eschatology. Its essence may be described only as potential. This notion of the Empire of God is the same that comes to expression in the parables of Jesus. In the parables, the Empire of God becomes a reality for the hearer only insofar as he or she enters into the narrative of the parable, giving him- or herself over to its reality and experiencing the new verities of human existence disclosed therein. In the parables, one finds a world that looks ever so much like the cultural world of common

"Jesus did not advocate a kind of moral fine tuning that would eventually perfect human society. He offered a radically different notion of how to order human life. "

orientation, and yet as the parabolic narrative unfolds one finds that world systematically subverted and deconstructed. As this familiar world crashes in on itself, new space is created for the Empire of God. But all of this has permanent existence only as potential. Only as persons choose the parabolic experience as that reality out of which they shall live does the Empire of God become real and realized. In the preaching of Jesus, the Empire of God is neither future nor assuredly present; it exists as a potential to be actualized in the decision to live out of its audaciously presumed reality.

Jesus' preaching about the Empire of God offers an alternative view of the future that is quite different from the options left to us at the end of the last century. Jesus' view of the future was not an apocalyptic one, in which God would intervene with violence to overthrow our enemies. Regardless of how evil our enemies have appeared to be, God has not, and probably will not, destroy them in the manner of our dreams and fantasies. On the other hand, Jesus' daring to speak of Empire, calling into question Rome's Empire and eventually becoming its victim, should

⁴¹ For the authenticity of this saying, see N. Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 68-74.

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caution us against any form of realized eschatology that presumes our golden age has arrived. For Jesus preached an Empire of God whose presence was not guaranteed and perhaps could not ever be. It depends on one's decision to live out of its reality in an act of faithfulness. But in precisely this sense, Christian theology must still be thought of as fundamentally eschatological. It is indeed about bringing something to an end and beginning something new. In the preaching of Jesus, the person of faith receives an invitation to embody the eschaton in his or her very existence, to assert its present reality and to live it from potential into actuality. The eschaton as "end" means the end of life lived out of the realities of sin, injustice, violence, shame, and pain. But it also has an "end," that is, a goal. It is not a distant goal or one so remote that one must despair of ever reaching it. The end of eschatology is the Empire of God. It is reached day in and day out, in the very everyday decisions one makes to live faithfully to God.