The Kingdom of God 3
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, June 11, 2000
Abstract
Watch for the Coming
Jesus concludes his speech with a promise that the kingdom will be here within a generation, the forty years of the cosmic battle.
Bible commentators have seen a contrast between the first part of the speech and the end. Initially certain, Jesus finishes not sure, but the two halves are perfectly compatible. The first part answers the question: “What shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled?” Jesus, as an Essene has read the signs of the times and is certain that the kingdom is imminent. “Tell us, when shall these things be?” the disciples had also asked. As depicted by Mark, having taken some time listing the signs, Jesus finally gives his answer. It consists of verses 30 to 37: the kingdom will have arrived fully within the present generation but no one except God knows precisely when it will all begin. It could be anytime—everyone should be vigilant—everyone should Watch—should keep alert—it will not be long!
Jesus makes it plain that he is not talking about an unlimited time, the interpretation the clergy use, because he gives a little story to explain it. The master of the house may come in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning—but not next year or in 2000 years time! While one can grant that the times in the illustrative tale are metaphorical up to a point, they have been chosen to show that he was not talking about long. In Luke 12:35-40, the story is modified, but significantly the man is attending a wedding—again the metaphor of Israel being reunited with her husband God (the necessary preliminary being the defeat of the Romans who had usurped God’s position). One of the names of the Essenes was the watchers for the kingdom—plainly these verses of Mark are reflecting that.
At this point, Luke 21:37-38 tells us that Jesus taught in the temple by day but, at night, he did not go to Bethany or lodgings anywhere else but he went to the Mount of Olives! The reason for this strange behaviour was to watch for the coming of the archangel Michael, which Zechariah 14:4 had prophesied would be when the Mount of Olives split east and west.
Matthew 25:1-13 gives us the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the message of which is the same: be alert for the coming of the kingdom. Do not relax. The foolish virgins were not prepared—they had not brought oil for their lamps. When the message came that the bridegroom was arriving, their sisters, the wise virgins, would not share their oil with them. The foolish virgins departed to buy oil for their lamps and while they were gone the bridegroom arrived. On their return the door was shut and they were forever excluded. As always the bridegroom is God—not Jesus—and his arrival is for the marriage with His people, Israel. Those who are prepared—the Righteous—are admitted to the wedding but not those who are unprepared. The parable makes it clear that the watchers for the kingdom are not merely look-outs. The point of their alertness is not to see the miracle, but to be sure not to transgress in the slightest way. The kingdom might arrive that very instant, and a transgression would mean you are locked out.
Those unsure of the later pagan elaborations of Christianity should note that in verse 32 Jesus again distinguishes himself from his father, God. If Jesus and his father were one and the same Jesus must, like his father, have known the precise time of the apocalypse. The Trinity concept leads one to conclude that if the gospels are true then Jesus (and therefore God) is a liar! But the reference to the Son in verse 32 does not sound genuine. It has probably been added by the early church.
Mark, because he is hiding it, says nothing unequivocal about the Roman counter attack, though broader hints of it appear (misplaced) in Luke’s gospel. The Romans had made a strategic withdrawal to await reinforcements. When they arrived a few days later, they counter-attacked. The success enjoyed by the irregular in the countryside cannot be enjoyed in set battles. The Nazarenes were beaten—probably relatively easily—by the well drilled and disciplined Romans. Mark’s gloomy apocalypse records trials and tribulations to stand for something which could not be related—defeat! From this point on Jesus is a dead man.
Watching for the Miracle
In Mark 14:32-14:42, in a tremendously moving scene, we have the climax of Jesus’s hopes—God’s miracle fails to happen and Jesus expects to be despatched by a sword thrust in his chest as a false prophet. Many Christians hate this scene because Jesus is manifestly distraught and appears to be weak—in other words, human. This suggests the tradition is genuine.
The remnants of the Nazarene band are at the end of their tether. They are exhausted and fearing capture at any time. Jesus selects his three high priests, Peter, James and John as he always did for ritual occasions. He is expecting God to split open the Mount of Olives, to take him up, to call in “the elect” and send forth the archangel Michael with the hosts of heavenly angels. Matthew and Luke have fossils of this in their parallel accounts. In Matthew 26:53, Jesus boasts that should he wish it his prayer would call down more than twelve legions of angels. In Luke 22:43, a single angel actually does appear. Luke also has Jesus apparently sweating blood, another possible allusion to the cosmic battle that was expected at this juncture. The idea was probably to imply to those converts who had some knowledge of Essene philosophy, that the cosmic battle actually mystically occurred within Jesus. In Revelation 12:7-9 Michael and the angels did fight a battle against Rome—the dragon—and Michael prevailed, the archangel Michael taking on the role of the messiah. Plainly this is a Christian expression of the brief victory that Jesus and the Nazarenes did experience against the Romans in capturing Jerusalem.
Jesus becomes sore troubled, an expression which is not too strong, the Greek having connotations of indescribable anguish. Nothing is happening. Could he have been wrong all along? He hopes desperately for a miracle but is beginning to lose faith himself. “My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death”, he says meaning he is wondering whether his destiny might be eternal death rather than eternal life. There must be a sign somewhere. “Watch”! he tells Peter, James and John, echoing his advice in verse 13:37. He prays that the miracle will come because God can do anything:
If it were possible the hour might come for me. Father, Abba, all things are possible unto thee.
Conventionally translators write the hour might pass away from me and remove this cup from me both constructions of the later church. For clergymen the hour came to mean the hour of Jesus’s suffering, atoning for the sins of mankind. The cup similarly became a church term for suffering. But Jesus could only have used “the hour” in an absolute way like this in the sense to which he was accustomed—the sense in which it was so used before the church invented new meanings. For Jesus it meant the hour of fate—the hour at which the miracle to open up the kingdom was to occur. The proper sense is “the appointed time”. “Pass” is properly “arrive” or simply “come” and “from him” should be “for them”, meaning the children of Israel.
Returning from prayer to see whether the disciples have seen any signs of the miracle he finds them asleep. He comments on the weakness of their flesh—the fact that they have collapsed exhausted—though this is possibly a statement meant to be of himself when he realizes his fate is that of the worthless shepherd not the glorious messiah. Interestingly Jesus calls Peter by his proper name, Simon. Talking tough was no longer appropriate. He rouses them; urges them to watch again and repeats his prayers. The same happens—they are again asleep.
Jesus’s prayers are heartwrenching, pleading and tearful prayers of supplication, as Hebrews 5:7 clearly reveals if it is not clear enough here, but not for his own life—for the kingdom to come. After a third prayer Jesus gives up, saying to God: “Not what I will but what thou wilt”. The glow of the dawn sun can be seen. His prayers have not been answered. He has misinterpreted the signs of God’s will. The disciples are again asleep. “Sleep on now; take your rest. The hour has come; the end is yet far”, he says admitting his error, the phrase “it is enough” being properly translated “the end is yet far”. The kingdom is not imminent. Verse 41 should be omitted. It adds nothing that is not instantly clear and has been retained only because it has been read as a supernatural perception. It looks as if a marginal note, serving as a title or signpost for some diligent bishop has been mistakenly incorporated into the text by a copyist.
The story has been stylized into a typical threefold tale but it probably signifies that they waited in the Garden overnight. In that time Jesus could have found the exhausted disciples asleep several times, as the story indicates. Eventually, Passover night came to an end, and with it Jesus’s hopes of a miracle—the new visitation would have corresponded in time to the previous one. Once dawn had come, once the hour had come—the prophesied hour—with no result, the Essene has to return to his calculations and interpretations. But Jesus had committed himself. He was now a false prophet and had to submit himself to the false prophet’s punishment, to offer himself as the worthless shepherd in atonement for his presumption of knowing God’s will.
Notice that Jesus seemed to consider the day to have ended at dawn whereas a Jewish day normally ends in the evening. This suggests that Jesus was reckoning on the basis of the Essene solar calendar.
Evasions
The teaching of Jesus is summarised by Christian scholar, Rudolf Otto (OTT-KOGSOM).
The time is fulfilled. The end is at hand. The kingdom is near. In some senses it is even already present.
Yet, it is not fully present and only the Father knows when it will be.
Christian commentators examining this question never give serious consideration to whether some of Jesus’s prophecies of the End might have been altered by the evangelists or the early church to account for the failure of the kingdom to appear.
In several places, Jesus seems to say that the kingdom would come within the lifetime of the members of his audience, or within this generation—forty years to a Jew. If Jesus was expecting the End soon, how could he be telling his followers to expect beatings in synagogues, hatred by men and trials before councils and kings, implying a delay of a considerable, if indeterminate time, before the kingdom manifested itself.
The crucifixion of Jesus should have been the end of his movement, but it turned out not to be, and so the evangelists of the continuing Jesus movement had to extend the time horizon for the coming of the kingdom. They had to give another reason for the anguish of Jesus in the Garden, to disguise the truth that he expected God’s miracle, so made out that Jesus simply struggled over the personal sacrifice he was about to make as mankind’s saviour.
It is all constructed later from the original which is given away by the concern with time, the expectation that whatever was to happen had to happen sometime that night, the reference to an angel or angels in Matthew and Luke (all that remains of the angelic hosts Jesus expected) and that Jesus concludes saying: “It is yet far” or distant (not, “it is enough”). He plainly meant the miracle was yet far. As day dawned, he resigned himself to the fact that the heavenly host would not appear.
Christian commentators say that Jesus taught righteousness, so he could not have been expecting the world to end soon. It must have been going to last long enough for people to show that they were living righteous lives. The answer is simple. Even if the world was to end in the next second, it was sufficient time for a righteous person to sin mentally. Jesus declares that even a lustful thought would be sufficient to debar an otherwise righteous man from the kingdom of God. The message of Jesus and John the Baptist was that Jews should sincerely repent and be baptised. Then they could enter God’s kingdom. But they could not if they went around being sinful again. They had to repent then remain righteous until the kingdom came. Repentence was not some sort of immunisation against sin. It was a confession of previous wrong and a commitment not to sin again, whether the commitment was for a second until the kingdom came or a generation.
Despite the plain intensity of Jesus’s belief that the Day of God’s vengeance was imminent, Christians have constantly suited themselves by believing that nevertheless Jesus intended to found a new religion. Proof of it, they claim, is his promise to build in three days a temple not made by hands.
For these Christians, the temple stands for the old Judaism that would be replaced by Christianity after Jesus’s three days in the tomb. Jesus meant the three days of the kingdom before the righteous were resurrected and God’s perfectly holy temple was miraculously made not by hands as was prophesied. Jesus, like any other dead righteous Jew, would have lain “asleep” while this was happening, so he was not speaking specifically of his own residence in the tomb but the three days delay expected by all the righteous before they were resurrected into paradise. The perfect temple was not made by hands—not made by humans—because it was made by God!
That Christians to this day, and clever ones, still scratch around in the New Testament for evidence that Jesus was aiming to found a new religion when his clearest desire of heralding in the end of the wicked world ran counter to any such project, is pitiful.
To judge historical events correctly, they have to be judged in their historical context. Christian scholars persist in refusing to do this. Though the country of Judaea was in a turmoil of revolutionary unrest and Jesus was hung as a rebel, they persist in depicting him as a misunderstood and falsely condemned advocate of peace with the Roman enemies of the Jews.
If this were really his policy, then he would have been a valuable ally of the Jerusalem priests—who were also friendly with the Romans as the gospels make clear—not their enemy. If this were his policy, he would also not have been abandoned by Pilate so easily. The Romans knew the priests were unpopular among the masses and a friend who could beneficially influence the multitude in favour of Rome would hardly have been crucified because a few priests did not trust him. Christians ought to be asking why the early gentile followers of Jesus sought to disguise the truth in favour of a tortuous myth.
Another obfuscatory tack is to claim that Jesus drew upon “ideas belonging to the sphere of the apocalyptic” (OTT-KOGSOM) but went beyond them with his message “entirely new and peculiar to him” of a “supramundane future in a new era stretched from the beyond into the natural world as the power of salvation”. Christians will believe this because it suits them and because they believe anything that a Christian authority tells them even if it is self-evidently false. This message supposedly new and peculiar to Jesus was the standard message of the apocalypticist to the righteous. One might quibble about the word “supramundane” because Essenes saw the kingdom of God as being in this world. Yet it was not the world as it is because it had joined to heaven and become perfect. It was this world but no longer this world. It was a supernatural world of necessity because perfection is impossible in reality.
Christians want us to believe that it is understanding this fantasy that is the mysterion spoken of in the gospels. In fact, the word refers to the “hidden things” of the Essenes and these seem to be ways of reading the scriptures as coded prophecy of the apocalypse and the events leading to it. The mysterion of Jesus is the reading of signs that the kingdom is about to break on the world.
Jesus began convinced the kingdom was imminent because Essenes had read the signs, signs that Jesus would not reveal to others because they were secrets of the sect. The signs were clues that the sinful world was reaching its final stages, but although all the signs were in place, Jesus was never sure exactly when the great event would begin, and he told his disciples so.
However, by defeating the Romans, the principle requirement had been achieved and Jesus expected the miracle to follow quickly. The Romans must have been defeated before Jesus could enter Jerusalem as a king and clean out the temple. The fact that he was able to do these illegal acts in the main city of the province at the height of an annual festival proves that the authorities were no longer in control. The Romans had been defeated but the Nazarene victory has been disguised in the gospels. God had to act quickly thereafter because the Romans had withdrawn only to re-group and get reinforcements. If God did not act, Jesus knew he was a dead man.
The Romans recaptured Jerusalem before Passover and Jesus had to go into hiding to avoid capture and enjoy a final messianic meal with his remaining followers. It was the eve of the Passover, an auspicious occasion for God to act. Plainly by this time Jesus knew the miracle had to that very night or it would be never. He had played his own role and captured Jerusalem. The Romans had returned and recaptured the city putting all of the surviving Nazarenes in mortal danger, but that was of no consequence. The point had been made. God’s Chosen People had shown to Yehouah that Satan’s princes were undesirable. It was now up to Yehouah to send His general, the archangel Michael with the heavenly host of angels and saints to finally overwealm Satan. The miracle would occur at the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus went there certain that the heavenly host would arrive. This was the one occasion when it was plain that Jesus knew within a night time that the miracle was due. But it never came!
Other references often seem to show knowledge of the seige and destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans. Christians will believe that Jesus prophesied it but it was an easy prophesy to get right when the gospels were written because it had happened. Jesus certainly will have spoken of the destruction of the polluted temple of the froward priests but he meant when the kingdom came. He could not have been prophesying the Roman conquest of Jerusalem because he was not expecting the world to last until 70 AD.
These instances show that the first Christian bishops were making the story fit their own requirements. They were not recording history, they were telling lies.
Jesus and Mythology
The heart of the message of Jesus is the kingdom of God. During the nineteenth century, Christians understood the kingdom of God as a spiritual community of men joined by obedience to the will of God. By obeying they sought to expand God’s rule in the world. The kingdom of God was slowly being built as a spiritual realm but active in this world and effective in the history of this world.
“The Preaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God” by Johannes Weiss was published in 1892. Weiss refuted the generally accepted interpretation. The kingdom of God is not immanent in the world and does not grow as part of the world’s history, but is eschatological. It has little to do with human moral example, but comes when God is ready. God will renovate the wicked world as an uncorrupt world that is part of heaven.
Jesus did not invent the idea. It was already well known. Jewish apocalyptic literature described it, and Daniel is the earliest extant example. Jesus declared the kingdom of God was due, and Jews must prepare to face the coming judgement, but otherwise he shared the eschatological expectations of his contemporaries. Jesus expected that this would take place soon, in the immediate future, and that its dawning could be seen in signs and wonders. That is why he taught his disciples to pray:
Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
It would be a tremendous cosmic drama. The Son of Man will come with the clouds of heaven, the dead will be raised and the day of judgement will arrive, for the righteous the time of bliss will begin, whereas the damned will be delivered to the torments of hell.
Johannes Weiss scared both theologians and lay Christians. Rudolf Bultmann, in “Jesus Christ and Mythology”, says his teacher in dogmatics in Berlin, Julius Kaftan, said:
If Johannes VVeiss is right and the conception of the kingdom of God is an eschatological one, then it is impossible to make use of this conception in dogmatics.
But Weiss was right. Albert Schweitzer went further to say that not only the preaching and the self-consciousness of Jesus but also the day-to-day conduct of his life were dominated by an all-pervading eschatological expectation. Today there are few scholars who do not accept it. Only the lay Christians are kept in the dark because they will not read anything without permission.
Eschatological expectation and hope is the core of New Testament preaching throughout. The earliest Christian community understood the kingdom of God in the same sense as Jesus. It expected the kingdom of God to come in the immediate future. Paul thought that he would still be alive when the end of this world came and the dead rose. This conviction is confirmed by tones of impatience, of anxiety and of doubt which are audible even in the synoptic gospels and which echo a little later and louder in 2 Peter. Christians have held the hope that the kingdom of God would come in the immediate future ever since its inception, and have waited in vain.
Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.Mark 9:1
Is the meaning of this verse unclear? The hope was that the kingdom of God will still come in that very generation. Even this was a dilution. Jesus expected the miracle on the night of his vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane. This hope of Jesus and of the early Christian community was not fulfilled. The corrupt world still exists and history continues. History has refuted Christian mythology.
The eschatological drama and the kingdom of God are mythological. That means the presuppositions of the myth, the theory that the world, although created by God, is ruled by Satan, and that demons cause all evil, sin and disease are also mythological. Heaven, earth and hell, the intervention of supernatural powers in events, miracles, the intervention of supernatural powers in the inner life of the soul, that men can be tempted and corrupted by a demon called the devil and possessed by evil spirits, all are mythological! These concepts are mythological because they are not what we have found by careful scientific enquiry. Modern science rejects the belief that nature can be interrupted by supernatural powers.
History is the same. God or the devil or demons have no role in history. History is complete in itself and can in principle be known and understood. Nothing happens without a reason, though the reason might be someone’s idea. Some people are superstitious but generally people take it for granted that nature and history, like their own life, is not interrupted by supernatural powers.
The early Christian community regarded Jesus as a mythological figure. It expected him to return as the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven to bring salvation and damnation as judge of the world. To have been begotten of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin are mythological conceptions that were accepted about Jesus. In Hellenistic Christian communities, he was understood to be the metaphysical Son of God—a great, pre-existent heavenly being who became man for the sake of our redemption and took on himself suffering, even the suffering of the cross. Nobody hesitates to call the conception of the pre-existent Son of God who descended in human guise into the world to redeem mankind mythological. This mythology was widespread in the mythologies of Jews and gentiles and transferred to the historical person of Jesus. What then can be the significance for humanity of Jesus and of the New Testament if they are simply mythological?
The mythological conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and of redemption, are over and done with. Why should anyone make a sacrifice of intelligence to accept what cannot sincerely be considered true just because the Bible says so? Can the mythological parts of the gospel be eliminated and still leave any message of value? Various wisdom sayings are attributed to Jesus, though mainly they are not original to him, and he proclaimed the will of God—that people should be good. Jesus demanded truthfulness and purity, self-sacrifice and love of others. Christianity has violated all of this throughout its history, and the fact that Christians can be found who followed these principles means nothing because many who are not Christians have the same principles of life. These principles do not carry Christian copyrights.
One can ask whether the eschatological preaching and the mythological sayings of Jesus contain a deeper meaning which is concealed under the cover of mythology. Rudolf Bultmann thought it was possible and called it “demythologizing”. Its aim was not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.
Myths express the knowledge that humans do not control the world or even their lives. The world and human life, despite the discoveries of science, remain full of riddles and mysteries. Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. It personifies human desires and psychological foibles. It makes gods responsible for what we cannot control in the world and ourselves. Gods act like human beings but with powers that can explain what we cannot control.
This is true of the mythology in the Bible. God lives in heaven. What does this mean? It says in a way that simple people can understand that God is beyond the world, that He is transcendent. Not one of us can imagine tarnscendence. It is an impossible thought and one that is probably meaningless, but most people can look into the sky and imagine some fantastic being living where human beings cannot, far above the world in the world of the stars. What is evil is put beneath the earth in the dark and damp, where we shall all plainly finish, unless we strive for the stars according to the myth. Such a simple moral tale is sufficient for priests to establish their power.
Because these mythological ideas are no longer acceptable because of the discoveries of science, priests have reformulated the easy concepts in the form of impossible concepts—the transcendence of God and of evil. The fact that no one can conceive of these impossibilities becomes a boon, because it shows the superiority of God. Believers shrug them off as incomprehensible, and the priests smile.
Tthe idea of Satan and the evil spirits into whose power men are delivered rests upon the experience, quite apart from the inexplicable evils arising outside ourselves to which we are exposed, that our own actions are often so puzzling. People are carried away by their passions and are not in control of themselves, and then do unimaginable things. Yet the failure of the concept is that it places human responsibility elsewhere. Wickedness is beyond us, the result of these devilish powers, so every evil that humanity can imagine is theologically excused. If wickedness is allowed in human society then it will become self-sustaining. The consequences of people’s crimes become a social power dominating them. But it is the people who are at fault not any mythological master demon—or even a minor one. Mythology is metaphor, and taking metaphor literally is the Christian error.
Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Jesus is a Myth | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! booksOther Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History
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