To condemn, oppose, and defy the current order is not necessarily the same as, or even a stage toward, urging its reformation. Jesus certainly condemned, opposed, and defied the ruling authorities of his day. But he did not propose (or support) an agenda to reform the system. He believed God would destroy both the system and those who ran and supported it. He would then set up a new order. He didn’t need either urging or assistance.
Roughly speaking there were two sets of ruling authorities in Jesus’s time and place, what we today would differentiate as “political” and “religious.” The differentiation would have made little sense to Jesus or to anyone else in the Roman world. Romans, Jews, and everyone else saw these two realms (that since the Enlightenment have been differentiated) as closely intertwined and interdependent. There were not even words in Greek, Latin, or Aramaic that clearly designated what we today call
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In Christian history has there ever been a strong tendency or movement to think of God as a family rather than a Trinity—or to think of The Trinity as a family?
If not, do you have any idea why not?
A family has distinct persons but also unity as a family that, ideally, is fused by love. That seems to me to do a better job of imaging “three persons in one god” than an ad hoc, made-up term like Trinity. It would be much more familiar to people throughout history.
And a case can be made for thinking of the Holy Spirit as feminine (ie, the Hebrew word for spirit is feminine). Also, as I understand it, a female figure of wisdom in the OT contributed to our construction of the Holy Spirit. So you have father, mother and son.
With a little more imaginative theological speculation one could also equate Mary with an eternally begotten Holy Spirit and as a member of the Trinity. Both she and Jesus thus become incarnate. (And, stretching this to the limit, Joseph could be an incarnation of the Father). Protestants have long accused Catholics of treating Mary as a God.
There have occasoinally been theologians who think of the Spirit as “mother” — but it’s pretty rare, given the patriarchal world of, basically, all of history. But certainly putting Mary into the mix changed things for Christians from the early middle ages on….
In England and Wales, (not necessarily the rest of the UK), because the Anglican Church is the state religion, and bishops sit in the House of Lords, the separation of religion and politics isn’t perhaps quite so sharp as it is in the US. So maybe the English and Welsh have a slight advantage when it comes to heuristic anachronisms 😉
If Jesus believed the end was near, how do you explain him preparing disciples for prolonged mission where the gospel will spread, disciples will endure persecution, and the kingdom will grow like a mustard seed/leaven? How do these images of gradual/organic growth fit with the expectation that history would end almost immediately?
In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus speaks of wars/persecution/false messiahs, and the gospel reaching nations before the climax. Doesn’t this suggest a sequence rather than imminent cosmic conclusion? Jesus certainly viewed Rome as oppressive, but his prophetic denunciations are overwhelmingly directed at Israel’s leadership. Doesn’t that resemble OT prophets, who typically announced God’s judgment on Jews before the nations? So why assume Jesus’ climactic prophecies refer first to the end of cosmos rather than judgment on Jerusalem?
Wouldn’t Jesus’s discouragement of speculation about precise timing make it unlikely he believed the final consummation would occur imminently?
Doesn’t it seem like Jesus understood God’s kingdom as present and future? Through his ministry it’s as though God’s reign already begun breaking into history. Sure, Jesus expected God to act decisively and soon, but why not think decisive intervention was understood as inauguration of God’s kingdom with final consummation occurring later?
The primary task of scholarship on the historical Jesus is to separate what Jesus is *said* to have said and done (as found in the Gospels) from what he more likely *actually* said and did. Since the beginning of the 20th c., critical scholars have recognized that he predicted an imminent end, and aht the materials in which he speaks about a longer haul (growth, spread, churches, persecutions, etc.) do not go back to jesus himself but to later church story-tellers wanting to makes sense of him in their own context.
Wouldn’t you agree that Jesus’ teaching is deeply rooted in Israel’s prophetic tradition, where judgment and restoration regularly unfold in stages rather than as a single, instantaneous event? Historically, these stages often span decades or centuries. If Jesus located his ministry within that prophetic narrative, why think there’s a contradiction between announcing an imminent judgment on Jerusalem and envisioning a kingdom whose growth and worldwide restoration would take time?
The Gospels preserve both emphases. Jesus predicts the destruction of Jerusalem within “this generation,” yet he also compares the kingdom to a mustard seed, leaven, and harvest that matures over time. Rather than dismissing one set of traditions as inauthentic because they don’t fit a predetermined model, isn’t it equally plausible they reflect different stages of the same prophetic drama?
Don’t you worry that the criterion of automatically assigning “delay” traditions to the post-Easter church risks becoming circular? If one begins assuming Jesus expected the end of history immediately, then every saying implying development will inevitably be judged inauthentic. But if Jesus expected an imminent covenant judgment inaugurating a longer process of restoration, then those same sayings fit within his own teaching and require no appeal to later ecclesiastical invention.
1. Yes, Jesus’s reliance on Israelite prophetic writings such as Isaiah and Amos is something I emphasize at every opportunity. But he is not slavishly immitating their message. He has an apocalyptic view shared widely among other Jews of his day; the prophets were not addressing the issues of the devil, demons, world-wide cosmic destruction; resurrectoin of the dead; imminence etc. that you find in apocalypticists of Jesus’ day.
2. I definitely don’t think that we should start by asssuming that Jesus expected the end to come imminently. We instead go through all his teachings, carefully and critically; we note how often he either implies or flat out states that the end will come in his generation/to the pepole then alive; and we evaluate the likelihood that these statements go back to him or were later put on his lips. Given the frequency and centrality of the claim, and its multiple attestation, it appears to be historical. That’s the conclusion, not the assumption. We then go from there.
I appreciate the clarification and agree that the conclusion should follow the evidence rather than precede it. My question is whether the evidence requires us to conclude that Jesus expected every aspect of his eschatological vision to occur within a single generation.
I agree Jesus anticipated something climactic within the lifetime of his hearers. The question is what he expected to happen. Did he envision the destruction of Jerusalem, vindication of the Son of Man, final resurrection, restoration of Israel, and renewal of creation as one undifferentiated event, or as stages within the same prophetic drama?
What gives me pause is Jesus’ reliance on Israel’s Scriptures. While he undoubtedly had an apocalyptic worldview, he consistently framed his ministry through Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah, and other prophets. Those texts repeatedly present judgment/restoration as a progressive pattern: covenant judgment, exile/tribulation, and eventual restoration. Historically, those stages unfolded over decades/centuries.
If that prophetic framework shaped Jesus’ expectations, then imminent judgment upon Jerusalem isnt incompatible with a kingdom that grows gradually, mission to the nations, or restoration that unfolds over time. In that case, sayings about gradual growth needn’t be dismissed as ecclesiastical creations because they don’t fit a model of immediate cosmic consummation.
A Seleucid ruler attempted to eliminate the Jewish religion in Judea to start the Maccabean Revolt. The Maccabees (a family of priests) win but control Judea as dictators. Julius Ceasar appoint the Idumean leader as the governor of Judea – reducing the priest dictator to High Priest. Parthian invasion of 40 BCE install a Babylonian Jewish priest as puppet dictator. The son of the Idumean leader return to Jerusalem with a decree from the Roman Senate to be “King of the Jews” . . . and a mercenary army to besiege the city. A member of the Parthian-installed Jewish government (Hillel the Elder) prevents his own beheading by Herod by inventing a PSYOPS to control the Jewish people by their religion. The Scribes and the Pharisees. Meanwhile, a group of non-observant Jews with Persian and Hindu myths and practices since before the Maccabean Revolt exist as a well-known “secret” society. These are the Essenes of Josephus. Josephus was a Zealot – a group whose origins traced back to the civil wars of the Hasmonean Dynasty of priest dictators. The Zealots wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, not the Essenes. (Dr. Norman Golb, University of Chicago).
I’ve heard you mention you’ve come to doubt Jesus received a proper burial. I have some questions (I’m sure you’ve considered these, I just haven’t heard you address them):
Since the Gospels (and 1Thessalonians 2:14–15) portray Jewish authorities as primary force behind Jesus’s execution, is it possible Romans were comparatively indifferent to what happened to his body?
How much weight do you give to the archaeological evidence from Jehohanan benHagkol? Doesn’t his case suggest Roman authorities in Judea sometimes permitted bodies to be released for burial?
Given how few literary sources describe Roman crucifixion practices, why shouldn’t the Gospels count as a source? Their audiences lived close in time/culture to Roman crucifixion. If the burial account was implausible, I’d expect early critics to object saying, “That’s impossible-Rome wouldn’t allowed it.” Yet even critics such as Celsus don’t make that argument. Instead, Celsus attacks resurrection by claiming it originated with unreliable/hysterical women.
On that, does the prominence of women witnesses lend support to historicity? Or a member of the Sanhedrin burying Jesus?
What do you make of the accusation that disciples stole Jesus’s body in Matthew? Does that counter-explanation suggest Jesus was understood to have been buried somewhere specific?
I can answer only two questions at a time. I do think Roman officials were comparatively indifferent to what happened to Jesus’ body once he was removed from the cross, presumably some days later. But they had to dispose of it in *some* way and so did. I don’t think the Jonathan discovery shows anything about *when* he was given a burial. It does show that sometimes Jews (rich families, almost certainly) were eventually allowed to dispose of the remains (as opposed to having them tossed into a common grave or a shallow pit), but it was no bearing on whether that happened on the day of crucifixion We don’t now when he was buried with a stake still in his ankle.
Do you think the Jewish authorities were the primary driving force behind Jesus’s execution.. that is, that they were the ones who handed him over to the Romans and that the Romans themselves were comparatively less invested in seeing him crucified?
I think you’re probably right that the Romans would have been unlikely to honor a request from Jesus’s family for his body. If, for example, it had simply been Mary asking for permission to bury him, I would expect they would have denied the request, even viewing the continued humiliation of the body as part of the punishment. And, as you mentioned, the discovery of Jehohanan’s remains may suggest that only wealthy individuals could sometimes receive proper burial (Jesus, however, wasn’t wealthy).
But the Gospels present a somewhat different rationale for Jesus’s burial: the Jewish authorities wanted his body removed for Passover so it wouldn’t defile the land. Given Josephus’s statements that Roman authorities occasionally accommodated Jewish customs, and assuming the Jewish leadership was the primary force pushing for Jesus’s execution while the Romans themselves viewed him as less of a threat, does that combination of factors make the burial tradition seem any more historically plausible to you?
It appears the Jewish authorities wanted Jesus taken out of the public eye, saw him as a trouble maker, and informed the Roman authorities, or Pilate directly, that Jesus was calling himself the future Jewish king.
The Gospels indicate the authorities are concerned about Sabbath, ont about Passover. That would mean that every for every crucifixion in Judea, Romans cmpromised their empire-wide policy of leaving remains on the cross. Josephus’s statements run contrary to everything else we know, and he had good reasons for wanting Romans to appear specially favorable to Jews; since he doesn’t name a single instance of it actually happening, and we don’t have any record of it ever happening, anywhere in the empire, and since we know full well that Romans didn’t care about Jewish laws about Sabbath, I think the balance of probabilities is that the idea that someone was allowed to remove Jesus from the cross on a Friday afternoon was to set up the Christian claim that he left the tomb on Sunday morning.
Im impressed you read/give such thoughtful responses to complete strangers. Thank you!
Regarding Josephus’s motives- Neither Josephus nor Philo portrays Pilate as favorably disposed toward Jewish customs. In episodes like the “standards incident” and “golden shields,” Pilate compromises out of political expediency, not respect for Judaism (likely to avoid provoking unrest under Tiberius). Josephus presents this not to praise Rome’s accommodation of Jewish law but to underscore the intensity of Jewish devotion to ancestral customs.
Josephus remarks (War 4.317) that Jews were so careful about burial that even crucified criminals were taken down before sunset (reflecting Deuteronomy 21:22–23). Together, this doesn’t prove Joseph of Arimathea received Jesus’ body, but it undermines the claim that the request would’ve been impossible.
So why couldn’t a politically-pragmatic governor overseeing a volatile city on the eve of a major festival Sabbath make the Gospel burial account historically plausible as an exceptional case?
Granted, when Josephus describes mass crucifixions during the War, the context changes. Still, I don’t think it’s sound to assume wartime practices were identical to peacetime administration under Pilate.
Lastly, If the burial account were fabricated solely to support the empty tomb, isn’t Joseph of Arimathea is an odd invention?
There would be no reason for thinking that Pilate would consider the death of Jesus in particular a problem in a volatile city. In my view it only seems like he would since everyone today knows that his death was a BIG thing. But nothing suggests Pilate would have known much of anything about him. Just another ignorant preacher. If Pilate did allow him to be taken down , then the others would have been too, along with the corpses that had already been hanging on their crosses for a few days. But that week and every week of every year he ruled. And there is zero outside evidence that that happened.
I’m also trying to understand the historical logic behind the gospel reconstruction.
If the historical Jesus had actually remained on the cross for several days (per Roman practice) why would the burial tradition develop into such a specific story? Why not simply preserve the tradition that Jesus died after several days on the cross, happened to be removed on a Friday, and rose on a Sunday? That would still allow for a Friday burial and a Sunday resurrection without requiring Joseph of Arimathea to obtain special permission from Pilate or the emphasis on the urgent removal before sunset.
In other words, what explanatory work is being done by the detailed burial narrative? The earliest tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 simply says that Christ died, was buried, and was raised on the third day; it doesn’t specify that He had to be buried immediately after His death. So why posit the development of an elaborate story centered on Pilate’s permission, the approaching Sabbath, and the hurried burial, instead of a much simpler tradition in which Jesus remained on the cross for the customary period before eventually being buried?
Because the Scriptures were being invoked that it happened on the third day after death (story of Jonah; Hosea 6:2)
Sorry if it feels like I’m belaboring the point, but if you’ll permit me one more reply:
My point isn’t that Jesus’s popularity would’ve caught Pilate’s attention. Rather that Deuteronomy 21:22–23 explicitly says a person who has been executed and hung on a tree should not have their body left there overnight. Given that concern, do you think Pilate (especially during Passover, when tensions were already high) would have been inclined to remove the bodies of *any/all* crucifixion victims (regardless of status) promptly in order to avoid provoking unrest?
And on that note, it’s interesting that Jesus is consistently portrayed as having died the same day he was crucified. If early removal were a later invention designed to make the resurrection occur “three days later,” why not have the Gospels say that Jesus remained alive on the cross for several days, eventually died, was buried, and then rose three days afterward? That would seem to accomplish the same theological purpose (and be more credible).
Instead, the tradition preserves the rather inconvenient detail that Jesus died and was buried on the same day he was crucified, which, if anything, seems to fit naturally with the Jewish concern of Deuteronomy 21:22–23.
Yes, Deuteronomy 21 requires Jews to remove a victim attached to a tree before sundown. Presumably (though not certainly) when Jews hanged someone on the tree, if they followed the law, that’s what they would do. But Jesus was not executed by Jews. Romans crucified him. And Romans had no reason to want to keep the laws of Deuteronomy about corpses than they did about the laws involving kosher, or sabbath observance, or what happens if your ox gores a neighbor.
Wasn’t the sandhedrin a puppet for Rome?
It seems Jesus critiques oppressive power, refuses violent revolution, and redefines authority by placing God’s claim above Caesar’s. Doesn’t that prioritize the Kingdom internally , but without revolution—or dictating how politics should operate?
Jesus critiqued the nature of worldly power—coercion, domination, manipulation—and contrasted it with God’s kingdom, which is rooted in love, peace, and reconciliation. Was his message God’s kingdom does not operate through political domination? If so, the irony is the early church used religious political domination to force a narrative.
We actually are rather poorly informed on the Sanhedrin and its connectoin with the Roman authorities.
That looks exactly right to me: The Temple Priesthood were the civil service. Jesus’ attack on the Temple is thus, inter alia, a move to centralize the power of the king. Mt. 27 excoriates the Priesthood explicitly in his Passion narrative by depicting them as, inter alia, having failed in their fundamental duty as performing atonement for the repentant Judas (Mt. 27) and then one of them casting (!!) the blood money into the holy of holies (he would have made an excellent out-fielder, I reckon).
But here is a question: given the conceptual unity (in the minds of ancient Jews) of politics and religion, what implications does this have for providing a conceptual analysis of the ancient Jewish conception of God? What sort of being was He – what account can be given of His ontology?
I suppose it depends which Jew you asked. Most — apart from the few philosophers like Philo among them — didn’t delve into ontology. They thought of God more or less like lots of people do today, the Supreme Superhuman in the sky who created the world and is ultimatly in charge.
We in this country certainly could and should redress our grievances since that is a stated right in the US constitution. The servant that sits on his hands and returns the one talent with no earnings gets gnashing of teeth or something. Absolute subordination and submission is a ‘sin’, and worse yet a crime.