(14 votes, average: 4.79 out of 5)
Loading...In my previous posts I’ve given some of the arguments for thinking Jesus delivered an apocalyptic message that the end was coming soon with a divine intervention in which all the forces of evil would be destroyed and all people judged. I’ve actually saved what I consider to be the strongest argument for last, a final coup d’grâce. The argument is both simple and compelling. I wish I had thought of it myself.
In a nutshell, the argument is that we know beyond any reasonable doubt what happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and we know what happened in its aftermath. The continuity between the two is Jesus’ public ministry itself. This ministry began on a decidedly apocalyptic note; its aftermath continued apocalyptically. Since Jesus is the link between the two, his message and mission, his words and deeds, must also have been apocalyptic. That is to say, the beginning and end are the keys to the middle.
Here is how I explain it
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
According to the Wikipedia article on the Jesus Seminar “Members acted on the premise that Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic worldview…..” Shouldn’t this concept have been a matter for discussion and evaluation rather than a premise? Otherwise, the Jesus Seminar would seem to have been flawed from the beginning.
Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin’…. (But in reality, the members would surely argue that it was their conclusion, not their starting point).
> it was commonly understood that the one doing the baptizing was spiritually superior to the one being baptized
How did later Christians, including modern ones, deal with this? John the Baptist was spiritually superior to God/Jesus???
We can see especially how Matthew dealt with it. He has John declare that *he* should be baptized by Jesus, and not hte other way around. Jesus tells him to go ahead anyway, “to fulfill all righteousness.” Throughout history I suppose most Christians havve said Jesus did this to set an example for his followers: they need also to be baptized.
What made the Jesus Seminar insisted that Jesus was not to be understood as an apocalyptic preacher?
Did they not view John as apocalyptic either?
Some thought he was not; others thought that he was but that Jesus parted with him on this issue.
Good material, Dr. B. Thanks for posting it.
Since you introduce this by saying you’re not the first to think of this (persuasive!) argument, who did?
Also: How does Paul fit into this? His writing predate the gospels, after all, and he was a fervent exponent of the imminent eschaton.
I don’t know! I picked it up from *somewhere* about 45 years ago! And yes, Paul too was raised as an apocalyptic Jew, as so many others.
Hi there Bart. I’m new to your blog and website. I was wondering if you could recommend (or direct me to an online discussion?) of what Bible, particularly the New Testament, one might use for a non-faith oriented, purely academic and historical study of the Bible? Any other books besides your own that might be viewed as essential for a non-academic have handy as an accompaniment to self study? I see references online to Harper-Collins Study Bible, Oxford Study Bible, as possibilities. I grew up going to the Church of Christ, and we were adherents of the King James version. Thank you.
Right! My preferred translation is the New Revised Standard Version (done by a diverse committee of scholars, not all theological allies), and I especilly like it in a study edition suchs as the two you mention, the Harper Collins Study Bible and the Oxford Annotated Bible.
I find the Harper-Collins Study Edition a fabulous resource! For the Hebrew Scriptures, I like Alter’s three-volume translation (with a few reservations).
I like the NRSV too
Would it be roughly correct to say that most of traditional Christianity has argued that Jesus was not in fact mistaken about the kingdom of God coming within the lifetime of his own generation by following Luke in saying that the coming of Jesus himself is at least the beginning of the kingdom. In other words the kingdom has come – though not fully – and that Jesus was not wrong.
Or maybe that atonement and resurrection are the beginning of the kingdom — even though it won’t come fully until Jesus’s Second Coming? The kingdom being the accessibility of a supernatural heaven?
But I know that John says the kingdom is already present for those who believe in Jesus. I don’t think traditional Christianity picked up on that. They’ve been perhaps saying that the kingdom is present immediately after death in a supernatural heaven.
Yes, those would be common Christian views.
Hi Bart. I agree with your view of the beginning and the aftermath being apocalyptic in nature but I would quibble with the statement that the early Christians were Jews. Some were but not all. Paul’s mission was specifically to non-Jewish communities.
Sorry I can’t make the Waynesville dinner in February but I could in May!
Very informative article Bart, thanks for posting it!
“This means that Jesus’ ministry began with his association with John the Baptist”
I’m so grateful to see that you see that Jesus is kind of inaugurated into this mission.
I think the end of the age they wanted was the end of Edomite rule? The Herodian Dynasty. I think is why the early movement loves Isaiah, it’s a promise to unseat the Edomites and restore Aramean rule. Judah was Aramean, since his dad Jacob/Israel being Aramean is important to the Deuteronomy 26:5 creed. Maybe this is also why Jesus was said to be found in Damascus, it was once the only Aramean capitol.
“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much,” since he’s promising material rewards as well as eternal life, it’s probably not a Mayan 2012 situation, would be my guess. There was an increase of Jewish folk, like Babatha, gaining land in Nabataea, so I think that was an option, too — it was poetically giving up life in their homeland and gaining a new one.
Dr. Ehrman, Have you ever considered doing a course on how the New Testament went from being “just letters” to “the inerrant Word of God”? I just bought your Jesus/Paul course last night, and as I was reading the intro this morning I found myself wondering about this…ever given it any thought?
Good idea!
From Wikipedia today. “Crossan is a major scholar in contemporary historical Jesus research. In particular, he and Burton Mack advocated for a non-eschatological view of Jesus, a view that contradicts the more common view that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher.”
Enjoying this series. I was wondering: we have 5,000+ manuscripts of the NT, and I know some of the fragments are at various libraries. But is there a place where the majority of them are? I would imagine some archive in Israel. And if they aren’t, do you think they should all be in one place?
They are scattered throughout the world, and since they are valuable holdings for the libraries and museums that have them, they will never be collected into one place. But in a sense they are: there are sites where you can find them digitally these days, e.g., http://www.csntm.org.
Isn’t it possible that the “end of the age” that he was prophesying about actually happened at the destruction of the temple In AD 70?
After all I agree that Jesus, his apostles, disciples and the authors of the NT thought that the end of the age (not the end of the world) was going to happen in “their generation”
Since believing in what I just stated, it’s amazing how so much of the OT and NT makes sense now. Dots connected etc.
I recently read that when he said that no one knows the time of the end “not even the son” some manuscripts do not have that phrase. Was it added so that they could explain why Jesus wouldn’t have known the time since he is in fact “God” and the “end” didn’t come?
The more I read the Bible, the less I see a futurists eschatology.
Yes, some have argued that, but if you see everything that Jesus actually says about what will happen at the end in Mark 13 and Matthew 24-25, e.g., it’s not a close correspondence. The phrase “not even the Son” was almost certainly removed from Matthew 24:36 by scribes who were nervous about saying that the Son of God was not omniscient (the oldest and best mss have it)
I think your “What bridges an apocalyptic beginning and ending?” reasoning makes perfect sense! It also makes sense that the apocalyptic immediacy of Christianity would change as the decades of the new religion spread onward. Not only would followers realize the timeline Jesus had incorporated into his message had passed, but also the non-Jewish background of increasing converts would have identified less with the fulfillment of OT prophesies and more with the idea of eternal life. Dr. Ehrman, I do have a question: Jesus and John the Baptist were part of a group of apocryphal preachers/prophets. Did that line continue after them? Did it end with the Roman destruction of the temple? Or did the school of thought meld into early Christian communities and gradually die out?
There continued to be apocalyptic preachers among Jews up to the destruction of hte temple (Josephus refers to another one also named Jesus who was killed during hte Roman siege of Jerusalem). After that, apocalyptic fervor appears to have died out in Judaism, as “rabbinic” Judaism which was anti-apocalyptic) started to emerge. And yes, many Christians remained apocalyptic after that.
How about the January Gold Q&A?
I think it’s been published, no? I’ll check!
Dr. Ehrman, this is not directly related to your post, but I was wondering. Do you have any videos/plans for podcasts to talk about the Didache? What it is, who wrote, is it authentic, when it was written… I mean, I understand it quotes the apostles. Do we have reason to believe these quotes? I want to learn more about the Didache, but most of the info online is either biased towards or biased against the document. I just want to know what the best data says about the Didache at this time, and I figured “Who better than Dr. Ehrman for this question?”
Can you recommend some easy-to-follow material to understand the Didache and other early church doctrinal/historical documents? How they all fit together? I know Eusebius mentions it, along with many other documents. Just wondering how I can learn more about these things.
I appreciate your work, Dr. Ehrman. I wish you all the best, good sir!
I’ve posted on the Didache before. Just do a word search on the blog for “Didache” and you’ll find the posts.
Why was Paul’s description of Jesus so different from the gospels? He lived closer to Jesus’s time than did the authors of the gospels. He would’ve known more people who actually witnessed and knew Jesus. Was the man that Paul knew about less than impressive during his life and not worth mentioning?
That’s a topic I discuss at length in my online course, Paul and Jesus: The Great Divide, and in a number of my books. It’s a very big question why Paul doesn’t say much about the historical JEsus — did he know more than he says? how could he not? If he did, why didn’t he say more? Didn’t he really care what Jesus said and did in his life? Was he completely focused on the death and resurrection? Did he assume everyone already knew the sotries? Something else? Living close to someone’s time doesn’t necessarily mean knowing more about them. An Americn historian today knows more about Eisenhower than my parents did.
Dr. Ehrman:
You mention above that apocalyptic fervor pretty well died out of Judaism after the war of 67-72 ended with the destruction of the temple. I recently listened to a lecture by Rabbi Henry Abramson (absolutely wonderful loving man…makes me want to convert to Judaism!! almost) where he said that militancy simply went underground after the defeat…and flared up on and off, culminating in the Bar Cocba war in the 130s, and the slaughter and further distruction of Jerusalem after that event ended badly for the Jews. He suggested that the death toll in the final rebellion may have exceeded that of the 67-72…but I may be remembering him wrong there.
Comment?
I”m not sure the violence “going underground” is quite the right way to look at it. It re-ignited at a later time, that’s for certain. The second uprising was indeed horrific, but I don’t know the comparative numbers. It was at that point that Romans disallowed Jews from Jerusalem and made it into a pagan city.
It seems like with the sayings of John the Baptist, we don’t have very good sources to make any conclusion about what he was actually preaching. We only have short snippets from Mark and Q. Are these really so reliable that we can make any conclusive judgements from them? These stories of John were being passed around by apocalyptic Christians decades after John lived. Its like if the only sayings of JFK Jr. we had were from QAnon conspiracy theorists in which JFK Jr. was predicting the rise of Trump. The only other early source we have on John is from Josephus and he makes no mention of John making any apocalyptic claims.