Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§12.6 The Kingdom of God
1.12). But the hope was taken up again by Daniel, among others, in one of the
most famous and lastingly influential prophecies, that of the seventy weeks of
years (Dan. 9.24-27). It is generally accepted that the author was writing in the
Maccabean period and saw himself as standing in the final week, 464 of which
half (three-and-a-half 'times' = three-and-a-half years) 465 would be experienced
under foreign subjection (7.25; 8.14; 9.27). So 'Daniel' fully expected that 'the
end of days' was imminent (12.11-13). That hope again found only partial fulfilment
in the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom. But again it was taken up
by Christians attempting to articulate a clear hope for the future. 466 The point is
this: within Jewish prophetic/apocalyptic tradition there was some sort of recognition
that the partial fulfilment of a hope did not nullify or falsify that hope. Instead
the earlier hope became the basis and springboard for a fresh articulation of
the same hope.
In somewhat similar reflections, Anthony Harvey observes that as a story
needs an ending, so individuals looking to the future need some kind of closure
or boundary to make time finite and comprehensible for them. When some crisis
foreseen with the character of finality or the end comes and passes without the finality
expected, it is not necessarily seen as invalidating the earlier warnings,
which may simply be redirected to the next crisis. 467 When the end of a prophet's
story of the future did not prove to be the end, it did not rob the prophetic message
of its credibility in the eyes of those who cherished it. 468
We could press the point by observing that any hope by its nature gives
greater determinacy to what by its nature (the future) is indeterminate. For hope
looks beyond the known present and past into the unknown future. 469 And in trying
to speak of the future, hope (even inspired hope) can do no other than take the
patterns and structures of the known and from them attempt to construct (or dis-
464. E.g., Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination 87-90, 109; Holman, Till Jesus Comes 50-
51.
465. BDB, mo'ed lb; 'ad 2.
466. Rev. 11.2-3; 12.6, 14; cf. Luke 21.24. The prophecies were influential into the patristic
period (e.g., Justin, Dial. 32.3-4; Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 5.25.3; 5.30.4). See also W. Adler,
'The Apocalyptic Survey of History Adapted by Christians: Daniel's Prophecy of 70 Weeks',
in J. C. Vanderkam and W. Adler, The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity
(CRINT 3.4; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1996) 201-38. Indeed Daniel's seventy weeks shaped Christian
eschatology well into the eighteenth century.
467. Harvey was writing when the threat of nuclear war was at its height. It is interesting
to note how the de-apocalypticisation of the threat of global confrontation marked by the end of
the Cold War coincided with a de-apocalypticisation of the message of Jesus.
468. Harvey, Jesus ch. 4. 'Jesus and Time: the Constraint of an Ending', here 71-76, 89-
90.
469. 'The future moves like a horizon . . . and always remains the same distance away'
(Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus 278).
481