Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §12.2
we speak of the kingdom of God as a 'metaphor' 38 for the coming to power of
God as 'the unconditional will for the good' (Theissen and Merz)? 39 At all
events, we should heed well the warning not to treat Jesus' kingdom talk in isolation,
far less in terms of individual sayings evaluated on their own. Is there not
a larger story which his teaching was intended to evoke? If so, Jesus' kingdom
teaching can be properly expounded only within that context, at least in the first
instance. In other words, the context in view will be not merely the immediate
context of the individual occurrences of the term within the Jesus tradition or
even the context provided by each Gospel as a whole. It will have to be the context
of Israel's memory of its own monarchic past, of Jewish current experience
under the kingship of others, and of the hopes of the faithful regarding God's
kingship for the future. Here again we find ourselves caught in the fascinating
interplay between history and hermeneutics.
Such hypotheses as those just indicated cannot be dealt with satisfactorily
at the theoretical level. They stand or fall by their success in making sense of the
data. The obvious procedure, therefore, is to set out the 'context of meaning'
more fully, that is, the context of usage and association which would have informed
the hearing of Jesus' audiences, or, if you like, the context of meaning
which Jesus could have been expected to assume for his audiences' understanding,
however he may have attempted to tweak or challenge it. In which case, the
first task is to clarify the more immediate context of meaning for talk of God's
malkut/basileia.
b. God's Reign
Although talk of God's 'kingdom' is relatively scarce in the literature of Second
Temple Judaism, the content of the phrase would have been familiar. The data
have been reviewed several times recently, so all that is necessary here is to highlight
the chief points of significance. 40
38. Hengel and Schwemer think 'symbol' is 'zu unverbindlich, variabel und beliebig
austauschbar', and prefer to talk of 'gewisse unveräusserliche Metaphern' {Königsherrschaft
Gottes 6).
39. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus 246, 274-76.
40. M. Lattke, 'On the Jewish Background of the Synoptic Concept, "The Kingdom of
God'" (1975), ET in B. Chilton, ed., The Kingdom of God (London: SPCK, 1984) 72-91;
D. Patrick, 'The Kingdom of God in the Old Testament', in W. Willis, ed., The Kingdom of God
in 20th-century Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987) 67-79 (here 72-75); J. J. Collins,
'The Kingdom of God in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha', in Willis, Kingdom 81-95; B. T.
Viviano, 'The Kingdom of God in the Qumran Literature', in Willis, Kingdom 97-107; D. C.
Duling, 'Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven', ABD 4.49-56; G. Vermes, The Religion of
390