Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§12.3 The Kingdom of God
can somehow hold in our minds apart from the pieces (the picture on the box)
and which we can use to fit the pieces together to make up the whole. For the
various attempts of twentieth-century scholars to construct other larger myths
from what they took to be the extant parts do not inspire confidence. 87 What became
apparent was that the resulting myths were the constructs of twentiethcentury
scholarship rather than of the ancients themselves. Should, then, alternatively,
the various motifs be regarded simply as a sequence of disparate insights,
hopes, and aspirations which were put forward without any pretence to
completeness?
Probably so. In sequencing the above themes I have attempted to put them
in an appropriate order. But how the themes are to be related to one another is
hardly clear. For example, Ezekiel 34 envisages both Yahweh restoring and
pastoring his sheep and David as shepherd (34.11-16, 23-24); the Messiah figure
does not seem to play any part in the return of Israel from exile. Does the return
of Yahweh to Zion depend on the Temple being rebuilt? How to square the different
expectations regarding the Gentiles in regard to restored Israel? Are tribulation
and judgment the same thing? Was the hope of new creation simply a more
radical expression of hope for restored prosperity? Texts like Isaiah and Jubilees
correlate some of the motifs, but leave others uncorrelated. The animal apocalypse
of 1 Enoch (chs. 85-90) is the nearest attempt at comprehensiveness, but
not all of the above strands are woven in. 4 Ezra also helps clarify some of the sequence
probably most often in view: 'the day of judgment will be the end of this
age and the beginning of the immortal age to come, in which corruption has
passed away, sinful indulgence has come to an end, unbelief has been cut off, and
righteousness has increased and truth has appeared' (7.113-14).
More important, we need to recall that many of the texts covered in the
above review are sectarian in character. By no means can we assume that each
text expressed a broad consensus view. The point is not simply that we need to
allow, in effect, for different 'Judaisms' and thus for different 'stories' by which
different Jews interpreted their lives and expressed their hopes. It is more the fact
that other Jews, other Jewish sects, often fell under the condemnations or were
excluded from the hopes expressed in these documents. In other words, the factionalism
of Second Temple Judaism reinforces the fragmentary, and indeed disputed,
character of many of these hopes in the detail with which they were
spelled out. 88 None of this is to deny that those who spoke with hope for the future
trusted implicitly that Yahweh is king and that he had a coherent purpose for
Israel which he was in process of unfolding. It is simply to recognize the tensions
87. I refer to the 'Mandean fever' of the early decades of the century and the quest for
the pre-Christian Gnostic redeemer myth and 'the divine man'.
88. See above, §9.4.
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