I understood that much, but I don’t find it a satisfying explanation of your POV.  I can think of possible explanations, but I would rather you tell me. 

The best argument for tompicard’s POV (and it’s not all that great) is Jesus himself.  Why is he doing anything at all?  The Kingdom is coming, people will be saved or not saved based on their personal behavior, not on their beliefs, and Jesus can only reach a tiny handful of people in the time he thinks remains before God and the Son of Man bring the hammer down.  

Jesus believed God wanted him to preach coming of the Kingdom, to teach people the proper way to live in order to avoid Gehenna.   Strictly speaking, he believes the Kingdom is coming no mattter what.  

But a chicken and egg argument may not be the best way to understand him.  Because he still thinks every soul matters.  He believes this enough to risk his own life, which he lost in one of the most unpleasant ways imaginable.  He is encouraged by people from non-Jewish backgrounds seeming to understand him, and his ideas would have kept changing as his ministry went on, expanding, becoming more universal in nature.  

If conversion was not his goal, and it really doesn’t seem to be (he had no thought of creating any new religions), then what is he doing?  He’s reacting to the problem of the human race–that we aspire to morality, and perpetually fall short.  He didn’t invent Jewish Apocalypticsm–he just expanded upon it.  The more he looked, the more good people he found–or people who wanted to be good, and didn’t know how.  

He believes the God of Abraham is the only true god, but he also sees how any religion, even his own (in his mind, the only true one), can become a trap, a way to think you’re saved just by saying certain words and performing certain symbolic acts, and thinking yourself better than everyone who isn’t in the club–which without anything else behind it is a sure path to Gehenna, a mirage in the desert.  

He meets people with little or no religion, but great faith.  How to explain this?  He isn’t sure, but he keeps trying.  God must know.  He knows a transformation must take place, and I’m not sure he would distinguish between universal and personal transformation.

There’s an old Jewish proverb (quoted in Schindler’s List)–“He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”  While that’s from a later form of Judaism, you can see elements of it in Jesus’ own thought.  Yes, in literal terms, he believes the Kingdom will come, regardless of whether a certain unstated percentage of people respond to his teachings.  But Jesus of Nazareth was never on good terms with literalism.  Symbolically, he sees the Kingdom every time he sees someone perform a selfless act.   It’s a real place to him–but it’s also an allegory for the world we could have if we all loved each other.  Every time someone risks something to help another person, the Kingdom is there, briefly.  I think he’d agree with this.  I also think that he needed to believe it was more than just an allegory.  And that’s about the best I can do.  

Too many stories to all be later creations (I agree they got tweaked later on), and where did all the gentile converts come from in the first place?  From the Jewish disciples successfully converting gentiles, which doesn’t happen by itself.  Paul was not the first to do this, he simply did it better, and on a larger scale.  If Jesus hadn’t expressed openness to gentiles, that wouldn’t have happened.  It was happening well before he died.  And it jibes with his message, that Bart has laid out very well.  Being Jewish isn’t a free pass to the Kingdom, being pagan doesn’t keep you out.  It’s how you act on whatever beliefs you have that matters.  

Again, I think Jesus began ministering entirely to Jews, but was more peripatetic than his teacher John.  Wandering around, he would have run into all kinds of people, and his charisma would have attracted more than just other Jews.  He would have found, perhaps to his surprise, that sometimes gentiles were more receptive to what he was saying.  Again, his ideas would have been in a state of flux, as he adapted his message to those who showed up to hear it.  

Jews disliked Samaritans as much as pagans, if not more–you think the story of the Good Samaritan is made up?  Apparently his regard for them was so notorious, he was accused of being one, a story that made it into John’s Gospel.

How about the story about the Pharisee and the Publican?  Both are Jews, but the underlying message is “Don’t judge by outer appearances.”  All the stories about how he gravitated to outsider groups, to social undesirables are made up?  It’s the one most consistent thing in the gospels.  

That quote of yours doesn’t prove anything, because nobody is arguing he wasn’t trying to reach Jews–first and foremost.  But the towns of Israel often had a fair number of gentiles in them, no?  I’m not arguing he was doing what Paul did later.  And that quote isn’t saying he won’t talk to anyone but fellow Jews–Israel was a place with a lot of non-Jews in it.  

I’m not saying he was ‘woke’.  Jesus might have thought most ‘woke’ people are sound asleep. 😉

Agreed about what Jesus means by repentance, but “If you repent the kingdom will come” doesn’t show up when I type in that exact phrase on Google Advanced Search.

That’s what you want him to have said, but he never said it.  

Obviously there can’t be a Kingdom of God if there’s no one to inhabit it.  But I think you’re missing a crucial point.  Jesus didn’t believe everyone alive then was in need of repentance.  Some people were already leading good lives.  They could always do better, and so could he, but you don’t have to be perfect.  You don’t need to know the Kingdom is coming to enter it.  Otherwise, many of his stories make no sense (obviously the Good Samaritan would be in the Kingdom, just for showing kindness to a wounded stranger.) 

It’s entirely about how you live, and Jesus didn’t think nobody ever lived right before he showed up.  So strictly speaking, Bart is correct.  Jesus believed the Kingdom was coming, even if he didn’t convince a single person, because the sheep don’t need Jesus to be who they already are, and the goats won’t understand.  I think Jesus was concerned primarily with those who had the potential to go either way.  But the Kingdom is coming, and Jesus has no doubt there are many already worthy of entrance, even if he just goes out to the desert to meditate and pray, and never teaches anybody about it.  What he’s doing, he’s doing out of love and concern for those who waver in the middle (which is, of course, most of humanity).  

My question would be, what about all the good people who died before the Kingdom came.  Are they resurrected?  Or did they just miss their shot?  And if it’s necessary to wish for the Kingdom in order to enter it, how is that fair?  Most people in Jesus’ time never heard of it, even in Palestine.  This logical contradiction led to some pretty odd ideas in later Christianity–that the heathen who didn’t hear the gospel message would not go to hell, but limbo.  Hell would only be possible once somebody had shown up to proselytize.  

There’s a story I love, about a missionary trying to evangelize the heathen in Africa.  He’s talking to this one man there, and the guy says “Let me see if I understand you–if I had died before you told me about Jesus, I would have gone to a reasonably pleasant place, tolerable at least, but now I’m either going to enter paradise or (much more likely) be tortured horribly for all eternity?”

“Well–yes.”

“So why did you tell me?”

(Because Christians often have a hard time understanding Jesus.)

😉