Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§ 12.4 The Kingdom of God
a. The Kingdom Has Drawn Near
We have already indicated the headline and summary with which Mark introduces
his account of Jesus' mission: 'the kingdom of God has drawn near
(engiken)' (Mark 1.15). Matthew follows him (Matt. 4.17). We also observed
that the parallel accounts of the sending out of the disciples on mission (Q)
have them instructed by Jesus to deliver precisely the same message: 'The
kingdom of God/heaven has drawn near' (Matt. 10.7/Luke 10.9; Luke
10.11). 124 This is a notable fact and one not to be lightly discounted, that Mark
and the Q tradition agree in summarising the message of Jesus in precisely the
same words. Arguments about whether the various elements of Mark 1.15 go
back to Jesus or are redactional 125 continue to owe too much to a literary editing
conception of the traditioning process. Here as elsewhere, it almost does
not matter whether we can recover the precise words of Jesus. What matters is
that this form of words had become fixed and established in the re-preaching of
the earliest missionaries and churches as the central summary of Jesus' preaching
of the kingdom.
The force of the verb is also clear: the perfect tense (engiken) here indicates
an action already performed and resulting in a state or effect which continues
into the present. 126 It is not a timeless nearness which is in mind; something
had happened to bring the kingdom near. 127 The terminology is no doubt deliberate:
the Evangelists would have known well enough the difference between
'near' and 'far' (makran), 128 and the Q tradents were certainly aware of the difference
in saying that the kingdom had (already) come (ephthasen) (Matt. 12.28/
Luke 11.20). C. H. Dodd famously blurred this difference by hypothesizing the
same Aramaic term (m e ta, 'reach, arrive') behind both Mark's engiken and Q's
124. Luke's division of the mission material into two missions is of little consequence
here: Luke 9.2 (the mission of the twelve) simply reports Jesus commissioning the twelve 'to
proclaim the kingdom of God' (note also 9.11 and 9.60); Luke 10.9 (the mission of the seventy)
adds 'to you' ('the kingdom of God has drawn near to you'). For a brief survey of the discussion
see Meier, Marginal Jew 2.485 n. 155. Thomas has no parallel.
125. E.g., J. Schlosser, Le Regne de Dieu dans les dits de Jesus (EB; Paris: Gabalda,
1980) 96,105-106; Crossan, Fragments 54-56; Lüdemann, Jesus 10-11; on Luke 10.9 similarly
Schürmann, Gottes Reich 96-100. The reference to 'the gospel' is certainly Mark's formulation
(see above, n. 3). The Jesus Seminar regard the whole of Mark 1.15 as late (apart from the reference
to the kingdom of God, 'God's imperial rule') because 'Jesus' disciples remembered his
public discourse as consisting primarily of aphorisms, parables, or a challenge followed by a
verbal retort' (Funk, Five Gospels 40).
126. Good parallel illustrations of the usage are provided by Mark 14.42/Matt. 26.46;
Luke 21.20; Rom. 13.12.
127. See particularly Merklein, Jesu Botschaft 51-53, 56-58.
128. Cf. particularly Mark 12.34; Acts 2.39.
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