Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

CHAPTER 12
The Kingdom of God
12.1. The Centrality of the Kingdom of God
The centrality of the kingdom 1 of God (basileia tou theou) in Jesus' preaching is
one of the least disputable, or disputed, facts about Jesus. 2 If we are looking for
features which are characteristic of the Jesus tradition and relatively distinctive
to the Jesus tradition, then the kingdom of God has to be one of the first to be
considered.
In this we follow Mark's lead. In opening his account of Jesus' mission,
Mark sets out a kind of summary statement or headline: 'After John had been
handed over, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying,
"The time has been fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has drawn near; repent and
believe in the gospel"' (Mark 1.14-15). The repetition of the term 'gospel' is distinctive
of Mark's own perspective: 3 he sums up the whole of his presentation of
Jesus as 'gospel' (1.1) and thus interlocks the Jesus tradition with the term ('gospel')
which most characterized the post-Easter preaching of Paul in particular
and which may have been coined by Paul for that purpose. 4 The point here is that
1. I will translate Greek basileia consistently as 'kingdom', its most obvious meaning.
Whether the underlying Aramaic had a slightly different connotation is something to be discussed
below (§ 12.2b).
2. See, e.g., those cited by Meier, Marginal Jew 2.237 and 273 nn. 4-5; Becker, Jesus of
Nazareth 100-102; the summa et compendium of Jesus' message (H. Schürmann, Gottes Reich
— Jesu Geschick: Jesu ureigener Tod im Licht seiner Basileia-Verkündigung [Freiburg: Herder,
1983] 23).
3. The redactional character of Mark's euangelion references (1.1, 14, 15; 8.35; 10.29;
13.10; 14.9) was first fully demonstrated by W. Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist: Studies on the
Redaction History of the Gospel (1956, 1959; ET Nashville: Abingdon, 1969) 117-50.
4. See my Theology of Paul 164-69. Cf. Marxsen, Mark 138: 'The "gospel" which Mark
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