Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§ 12.2 The Kingdom of God
'sought', 22 people 'enter into' it, 23 and it is 'seized' and 'suffers violence' (Matt.
11.12/Luke 16.16). Such imagery is without parallel in early Jewish or early
Christian literature. In the rest of the NT, only Acts 14.22 speaks similarly of
people 'entering into the kingdom of God'. The Gospel motif is hardly to be explained
from that isolated occurrence; rather, the latter is most obviously to be
explained as an echo of the Jesus tradition. 24
In short, the evidence we have points to one and only one clear conclusion:
that Jesus was remembered as preaching about the kingdom of God and that this
was central to his message and mission. 25 The impact of this preaching has been
retained in the Jesus tradition, though less clearly elsewhere in earliest Christian
writings.
12.2. How Should 'the Kingdom of God' Be Understood?
The conclusion just reached is clear and beyond dispute. But if talk of the kingdom
was so distinctive of Jesus' preaching, how would it have been understood
by his first hearers? In the case of a creative person such as Jesus evidently was
we must always allow the possibility that distinctive emphases emerged from his
own insight or inspiration. But even so we also must assume some context of
meaning for his talk of 'the kingdom of God', since otherwise it would have been
a meaningless term for his hearers, and the teaching of which it was the principal
theme would have been more of a puzzle than anything else. 26 Nor will a
narrative-critical approach be sufficient at this point: the term itself is used without
definition, and the way what is said about the 'kingdom' actually illumines
the term is at the heart of a long-running debate. Moreover, as we have just seen,
the Evangelists themselves all assume that Jesus preached (the good news of) the
kingdom of God from the first, as did also the disciples whom he sent out on mission.
Alternatively expressed, the tradition shows Jesus and his mission disciples
22. Matt. 6.33/Luke 12.31; also Matt. 13.45. For possible Aramaic see Dalman, Words
of Jesus 122.
23. Mark 9.47; 10.15, 23-25 pars.; Matt. 5.20; 7.21; 21.31; 23.13; John 3.5; GTh 22,
114. Note also Luke 13.24; 14.23; 16.16.
24. The 'entering into' the kingdom words are a good example of a Jesus tradition motif
which on almost any reckoning has to be attributed to Jesus, even if individual cases may be
best seen as elaboration of a motif remembered as having originated with Jesus. See, e.g., F. W.
Horn, 'Die synoptischen Einlasssprüche', ZNW 87 (1996) 187-203 (here 193-97).
25. Pace Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship 87.
26. 'To say "the kingdom of God is at hand" makes sense only when the hearers know
"the story so far" and are waiting for it to be completed' (Wright, Jesus 226); but note already
the comments of G. B. Caird, New Testament Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) 367, and
further below, §§12.3 and 12.6.
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