Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §12.5
the kingdom of God is 298 among you (entos hymen)' (Luke 17.20-21). 2 " This
was a key saying for the old Liberal questers. They took the final phrase as
'within you', a quite legitimate rendering, and as thus supporting the idea of the
kingdom as a spiritual force within individuals, improving them morally and motivating
them to do good. 300 But that would hardly be how Luke understood the
phrase: he has Jesus making the pronouncement to Pharisees! 301 'Among you' is
much the more favoured rendering today. 302 What is probably most significant
about the saying for us is the tension it displays between the idea of the kingdom's
coming and the idea of its presence: the kingdom's future coming is not a
matter of calculation; the kingdom is already present. The future coming is not
denied, only its calculability; but attention is directed rather to its presence.
Whatever we make of particular details and individual sayings, the same
noteworthy fact emerges as in the previous case (§ 12.5a). We hear the same note of
realised expectation, of something climactic of eschatological significance already
happening, of something new breaking through old traditions, of God's kingdom as
an unexpected discovery of life-changing import, of a present reality of God's rule
"times and seasons" (e.g., Wis 8:8; 1 Thess 5:1; cf. Mark 13.32; Matt 24.36), i.e. a sort of eschatological
timetable' (Fitzmyer, Luke 1160; fuller discussion with similar conclusions in
Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom 99-100; Meier, Marginal Jew 2.424-26). Perrin extends
the point: Jesus 'equally categorically rejected the treatment of the myth as allegory and
its symbols as steno-symbols' {Language 45).
298. To translate the final clause with a future sense ('is to be'; 'will [suddenly] be',
Jeremias, Proclamation 101) would lose the saying's more obvious antithesis, which can only
be partially restored by inferring in addition something like 'is to be suddenly' (Beasley-
Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom 102).
299. GTh 3: '. . . the kingdom is within you and outside you . . .'; GTh 113: 'His disciple(s)
said to him: On what day does the kingdom come? (He said) It does not come when one
expects (it). They will not say, Look, here! or Look, there! But the kingdom of the Father is
spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it'.
300. E.g., Harnack, What Is Christianity? 55-57, 63; Dalman, Words of Jesus 145-47;
J. Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Lucae (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1904) 95; among current opinion
note also C. C. Caragounis, 'Kingdom of God/Kingdom of Heaven', DJG 417-30 (here
423-24); T. Holmen, 'The Alternatives of the Kingdom: Encountering the Semantic Restrictions
of Luke 17,20-21 (entos hymön)', ZNW'87 (1996) 204-29. The interpretation is early and
was shared by the rendering in GTh 3 and, it would appear, Dial. Sav. 16. See further Beasley-
Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom 98-99, 100-101.
301. See further Meier, Marginal Jew 2.426-27 and n. 116.
302. See, e.g., Kümmel, Promise 33-35; Perrin, Rediscovering 13-74; Beasley-Murray,
Jesus and the Kingdom 100-102, though Beasley-Murray and Fitzmyer are attracted by the
sense 'within your grasp' (Luke 1161-62; also Wright, Jesus 469; McKnight, New Vision 102-
103; cf. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus 260-61: 'The saying remains a riddle'). But that
would also weaken the saying's contrast (Meier, Marginal Jew 2.427). Meier goes on to give
good reasons for seeing in the saying a recollection of Jesus' teaching (428-30), including a
possible reconstruction of the underlying Aramaic (483 n. 144).
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